Orr, Mary 1960- (Mary Margaret Orr)

PERSONAL:

Born 1960. Education: University of St. Andrews, M.A.; Queens' College, Cambridge, Ph.D.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of Modern Languages, University of Southampton, Highfield, Southampton SO17 1BJ, England. E-mail—M.M.Orr@soton.ac.uk.

CAREER:

Educator and writer. University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, Fife, Scotland, permanent lectureship; University of Exeter, Exeter, Devon, England, readership, then personal chair in Modern French Studies, beginning 1999; University of Southampton, Southampton, England, professor of French, 2005—. Previously held various temporary lectureship posts, including the University of Wales; Swansea University, Wales; Christ Church University, Canterbury, England; Oxford University, Oxford, England; and Queens' College, Cambridge, Cambridge, England.

WRITINGS:

(Editor, with Tony Williams) New Approaches in Flaubert Studies, E. Mellen Press (Lewiston, NY), 1999.

Madame Bovary: Representations of the Masculine, P. Lang (Bern, Switzerland), 1999.

Flaubert: Writing the Masculine, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2000.

Intertextuality: Debates and Contexts, Polity (Cambridge, England), 2003.

(Editor, with Lesley Sharpe) From Goethe to Gide: Feminism, Aesthetics and the French and German Literary Canon, 1770-1936, University of Exeter Press (Exeter, England), 2005.

Contributor to books, including Visions/Revisions, edited by Nigel Harkness and others, Peter Lang (Bern, Switzerland), 2003; and The Cambridge Companion to Flaubert; Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration, edited by Stacy Gillis, Rebecca Munford, and Gillian Howie, Macmillan Palgrave (Basingstoke, England), 2004. Contributor to journals, including Forum for Modern Language Studies, French Studies Bulletin, and Romance Studies. Also a general editor of Forum for Modern Language Studies.

SIDELIGHTS:

Mary Orr is a French professor and author of literary studies. In her book Madame Bovary: Representations of the Masculine, the author discusses the famous novel in relation to contemporary gender theory, touching on issues such as the modern crisis in masculinity and the denial and fear of aging. "At its best, Orr's exuberant reading of Madame Bovary throws up a wealth of original ideas, from her analysis of the recurring references to boxes and secret containers, to her intriguing observation of how different scenes in the novel are linked by smell," wrote Anne Green in the Modern Language Review.

Orr continues her study of Flaubert, this time concentrating on his entire oeuvre, in Flaubert: Writing the Masculine. Sonja Dams Kropp, writing in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, noted that the book is "guided by a dual optic: the socio-historical and cultural world of the author's times, on the one hand, and contemporary criticism informed by gender theory, on the other." Kropp went on to write: "Mary Orr's reassessment of Flaubert's characters in light of power structures endorsing male status constitutes a valuable contribution to the body of scholarship. Her elucidation of historical and social contexts, combined with insightful intertextual analyses and a skillful methodological approach make for an engaging study." Writing in the French Forum, Mary Donaldson-Evans commented that the author pays "heed both to the socio-historical context of nineteenth-century France and to late twentieth-century critical and theoretical perspectives, with particular attention to feminist work on ‘masculinities.’" The reviewer added: "The result is an extraordinarily well-researched and original, if not always wholly convincing, analysis of the male characters in Flaubert's fiction." Orr also served as editor, with Lesley Sharpe, of From Goethe to Gide: Feminism, Aesthetics and the French and German Literary Canon, 1770-1936. The book includes twelve essays focusing on the contributions of feminist criticism to the classic works of male writers.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

French Forum, spring, 2003, Mary Donaldson-Evans, review of Flaubert: Writing the Masculine, p. 117.

Modern Language Review, July, 2001, Anne Green, review of Madame Bovary: Representations of the Masculine, p. 833.

Nineteenth-Century French Studies, spring-summer, 2002, Sonja Dams Kropp, review of Flaubert, p. 401.

Reference & Research Book News, May, 2006, review of From Goethe to Gide: Feminism, Aesthetics and the French and German Literary Canon, 1770-1936.

ONLINE

University of South Hampton Web site,http://www.lang.soton.ac.uk/ (November 28, 2006), faculty profile of author.