Rita Bode is Professor of English Literature at Trent University. She is co-editor of _L.M. Montgomery’s Rainbow Valleys: The Ontario Years, 1911-42_ (MQUP, 2015) and _L.M. Montgomery and the Matter of Nature(s)_ (MQUP, 2018), which was awarded the Association of Canadian and Quebec Literatures (ACQL) 2018 Gabrielle Roy Prize (English) for the year’s best work of Canadian literary criticism. She has published on nineteenth-century American woman authors (most notably, Harriet Prescott Spofford), and transatlantic female literary traditions (most notably George Eliot, Harriet Beecher Stowe; Edith Wharton). Her research interests tend to focus on women writers, but her research and publications also include feminist analyses of canonical texts by male authors such as Melville.
She is on the faculty of the English MA in Public Texts (Peterborough) and has served as its Director. Her undergraduate teaching is Durham-based where she teaches a wide range of courses from Shakespeare to contemporary areas such as Latinx writing, and literature and health. She has delivered several conference papers on approaches to teaching specific literary texts and her teaching innovations include transatlantic projects of global outreach whereby members of her classes engage through online platforms with students from a European (or American) university class to discuss a literary work.
L. M. Montgomery’s Rainbow Valleys: The Ontario Years, 1911-42, co-editor with Lesley D. Clement. McGill-Queen’s UP, 2015.
“Introduction: Threshold Thinking,” Part I: “American Women’s Writing, Liminality, and Hybridity: Background and Contexts.” Liminality, Hybridity and American Women’s Literature: Thresholds in Women’s Writing, edited by Kristin J. Jacobson. Palgrave, 2018. 1-7.
“Between Silence and Speech: Willa Cather’s Speaking Bodies in My Ántonia.” In the Country of Lost Borders: New Critical Essays on _My Ántonia_,” edited by Stéphanie Durrans. Presses universitaires de Paris Nanterre, 2017. 107-25.
“Among the Prophets: Harriet Beecher Stowe and George Eliot in Italy.” Transatlantic Conversations: Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Encounters with Italy and the Atlantic World, co-edited by Beth L. Lueck, Sirpa Salenius, and Nancy Lusignan Schultz, U of New Hampshire P, 2017, pp. 118-135.
“Wharton’s Italian Women: ‘My Beloved Romola.’” Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism, co-edited by Meredith L. Goldsmith and Emily J. Orlando, UP of Florida, 2016, pp. 89-109.
“Belonging, Longing, and the Exile State in Harriet Beecher Stowe and George Eliot.” Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain, co-edited by Beth L. Lueck, Brigitte Bailey, and Lucinda L. Damon-Bach, U of New Hampshire P, 2012, pp. 188-207.
“Mother to Daughter: Muted Maternal Feminism in the Fiction of Sandra Cisneros.” Textual Mothers, Maternal Texts: Motherhood in Contemporary Women’s Literatures, co-edited by Elizabeth Podnieks and Andrea O’Reilly, Wilfred Laurier UP, 2010, pp. 377-91.
“A Case for the Re-covered Writer: Harriet Prescott Spofford’s Early Contributions to Detective Fiction.” CLUES: A Journal of Detection, vol. 26, no.1, 2007, pp. 23-36. [published in 2008]
“Narrative Revelations: Harriet Prescott Spofford’s ‘Amber Gods’ Revisited.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, vol. 50 no. 4, 2004, pp. 233-67. [published in 2006]
“’Suckled by the sea:’ The Maternal in Moby-Dick.” Melville and Women, co-edited by Elizabeth Schultz and Haskell Springer, Kent State UP, 2006, pp. 181-98
19th- and early 20th-century British and American; the novel; drama