Lewis, Jayne Elizabeth

views updated

Lewis, Jayne Elizabeth

PERSONAL: Female. Ethnicity: "Caucasian." Education: Princeton University, Ph.D., 1988.

ADDRESSES: Office—Department of English, HIB 435, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697. E-mail—jelewis@uci.edu.

CAREER: University of California, Los Angeles, past associate professor of English; University of California, Irvine, professor of English.

WRITINGS:

The English Fable: Aesop and Literary Culture, 1651–1740, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1996.

Mary Queen of Scots: Romance and Nation, Routledge (New York, NY), 1998.

The Trial of Mary Queen of Scots: A Brief History with Documents, Bedford/St. Martin's (Boston, MA), 1999.

(Editor, with Patrick Coleman) Jill Anne Kowalik, Representations of the Self from the Renaissance to Romanticism, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2000.

Editor, with Maximillian E. Novak) Enchanted Ground: Reimagining John Dryden, University of Toronto Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2005.

SIDELIGHTS: Jayne Elizabeth Lewis is the author of The English Fable: Aesop and Literary Culture, 1651–1750. In a highly literate, scholarly style she presents a historical summary that defines collections of British fables as texts. Lewis's own view, according to Choice contributor R.E. Jones, is that these "collections were instrumental in establishing texts as centers of cultural authority." Her book also includes studies of three fabulist writers whose work in this genre has not received a great deal of critical attention: John Dryden, Ann Finch, and John Gay. Jones called Lewis "a subtle analyst" and recommended The English Fable, though highly theoretical and academic, as worthy of the specialist reader's consideration.

Lewis also wrote Mary Queen of Scots: Romance and Nation, a study that traces differences in the ways that the English people have regarded Mary throughout various periods of history. The focus of her research begins with Mary as a writer, specifically a poet, even though the work for which she is best known (or notorious), the "Casket Sonnets," are almost certainly forgeries attributable to her political enemies. Lewis advances the hypothesis that Mary's work is hard to categorize, and therefore to study, because Mary herself, by virtue of her title, is associated with "a people" (the Scots), rather than a nation with geographical borders or formal sovereignty. Lorna Hutson reported in the Times Literary Supplement: "Lewis argues that the emergence of a nation is as much a family romance as a history," and that is the perspective from which Lewis approaches her scholarly analysis.

Toward the end of the book, Lewis explores and compares the ways in which men and women have regarded the figure of Mary, Queen of Scots in different historical time periods. For an example of this, Hutson identified Lewis's position that "the tragic queen was turned by men into the object of a connoisseurship [sic] of feeling" in Georgian times, while women "identified with her through their own erotics of writing and translating." According to Hutson, it is in this part of the book that Lewis's thesis emerges with the greatest clarity.