Anna Brecke, Ph.D.
Anna Brecke, Ph.D.
Adjunct Professor | University Seminars
Anna Brecke is an adjunct faculty member at Salve Regina and is also a Lecturer in Literary Arts at RISD. She holds duel Master’s degrees in English and Gender/Cultural Studies from Simmons University, and a Ph.D. in English from URI. Her research focuses on gender and popular media in the 19th century and today.
Her specific interests include non-canonical 19th-century women’s writing, the periodic press and serialized narrative, television and the gendered body, and supernatural/speculative fiction.
She is a co-founder of the Mary Elizabeth Braddon Association and is also an area chair in Women’s and Gender Studies for the Mid-Atlantic Popular & American Culture Association. She has appeared on the podcasts “The Victorian Scribblers” and “3 Interns and Counting.”
Featured Fall 2022
Widening the Sphere
Mid-to-Late Victorian Popular Fiction, Gender Representation, and Canonicity
Anna J. Brecke
Summary: This work addresses the erasure of popular women writers in the formation of Victorian studies. Mid-century critical work on the Victorian novel, which established a long-standing canon, was mainly concerned with the form of the novel rather than the literature of the Victorian period. Particularly overlooked were the popular works produced by women writers in sensation fiction, New Woman fiction, and speculative fiction. The absence of these writers and genres created an incomplete picture of women’s writing, and served to reinforce assumptions about gender roles and gendered space in Victorian literature and culture.
Publication Information
Anna Brecke, Widening the Sphere: Mid-to-Late Victorian Popular Fiction, Gender Representation, and Canonicity, Brighton: Edward Everett Root, 2021
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