 |
Renaissance
Center Acquires Papers of Oxford Scholar Harriett Hawkins
The professional papers, correspondence, publications and memorabilia of literary scholar Harriett Hawkins have been added to the collections of the Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies. Hawkins was an American scholar who became a Fellow of Linacre College at Oxford and a member of the university's English faculty. She died of cancer in 1995 at the age of 61. Her husband, Eric Buckley, gave her papers to the Renaissance Center. The gift, which consisted of about 12 boxes of materials, was arranged after Renaissance Center director Arthur F. Kinney was put in touch with Buckley by medieval scholar Kathleen Scott. Both Scott and her husband, Chancellor David Scott, were also Linacre Fellows, said Kinney. Primarily a literary scholar, Hawkins was also interested in a wide variety of related subjects, including popular culture and the science of chaos theory and its application to Renaissance writing. As her obituary in The Times of London noted, "Although primarily known as a Shakespeare scholar, she recognized a broader need to liberate discussions of literature from the shackles which certain modern critical perspectives had clamped on them." She mounted a direct attack on the orthodoxies of university English departments in her 1985 book, "The Devil's Party: Critical Counter-Interpretations of Shakespearian Drama," in which she argued that influential critics had tried to substitute moral for dramatic criteria in their evaluation of characters, an attitude she said obscured the dramatic tension and poetry of the plays. It was important to Hawkins that works of literature been seen as complex and frequently ambiguous portraits of real life. She resolutely opposed any approach to literature that restricted the audience's responses or which attempted to force the diversity of poetry and drama into a rigid pattern. Her bold stance was more remarkable for someone who came to the academic life rather late. Raised in Missouri, Hawkins graduated in 1960 from Newcomb College, Tulane University at the age of 26. She subsequently earned her M.A. and Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis before serving as an instructor at Swarthmore before her appointment to the faculty at Vassar, where she eventually became a full professor. At Vassar, she was known as "the beloved Harriett Hawkins." Hawkins spent the 1963-64 academic year at Oxford as a member of Linacre College, marking the beginning of a long association. She returned every summer for the next 15 years until 1978 when she married Eric Buckley, the printer to the university. She then retired from her post at Vassar to spend the rest of her life at Oxford. According to The Times, she "breathed an air of American freshness through the groves of English academe. Tall and strikingly handsome, she dressed with a panache and elegance not frequently to be found in Oxford's musty social life. But her verve and originality were by no means confined to her appearance. She had a lively and keenly original intellect which was to contribute greatly to both Linacre College and to the English faculty." Her best-known books include "Likenesses of Truth in Elizabethan and Restoration Drama," "Poetic Freedom and Poetic Truth," "Classics and Trash: Traditions and Taboos in 'High' Literature and Popular Modern Genres" and "Strange Attractors: Literature, Culture and Chaos Theory." She held fellowships from the American Association of University Women, National Endowment for the Humanities, Folger Library, Huntington Library and the American Council of Learned Societies. In 1975-76, she was a Guggenheim Fellow and in 1977, she won the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize given by the British Academy. Some of Harriett Hawkins' papers are currently on exhibit in the Renaissance Center's Reading Room. |
||
|
|
