Transformations of Trauma in Women's Writing (2023) 

This volume examines the ways in which trauma alters women’s identities. While some of the chapters look deeply at individual experiences, many of the contributions look to national traumas and the consequences of political abuses, including colonial subjugation and genocide for women. The book shows that language has a transformative power to change us, to give us a great capacity for inner and outer dialogues and for healing and self-love. As shown here, women have historically employed autobiography and memoir to free themselves and others; rather than seeing the limit of form, they reinvent the parameters to offer a new relationship with language.

Women Writing Trauma in Literature (2022):

This essay collection features studies on trauma, literary theory, and psychoanalysis in women’s writing. It examines the ways literature helps to heal the wounded self, and it particularly concentrates attention on the way women explain the traumatic experiences of war, violence, or displacement. Covering a global range of women writers, this book focuses on the psychoanalytic role of literature to help recover the voices buried by intense pain and suffering and to help those voices be heard. Literature brings the unconscious into being and focus, reconfiguring life through narration. These essays look at the relationship between traumatic experience and literary form.

The Beauty of Melancholy and British Women Writers, 1670-1720 (2020)

This book considers melancholy language in representative works by several British women writers in late Stuart England. To understand how these women writers understood and reframed the discussion about melancholy and women’s experience of suffering in their art, it turns to the twentieth-century French feminist theorist Julia Kristeva, whose radical work on melancholy in Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1989) provides an alternative psychoanalytic perspective for considering melancholy discourse created by women experiencing alienation, depression, and anguish in earlier periods. Kristeva offers a theoretical lens for understanding loss as a significant and ongoing perspective on life experience that finds expression through art and language. This text argues that early women writers created a new expressive mode, revising existing models to account for their own losses during a time of cultural and political transitioning in England. These writers provide a melancholy aesthetic in their works or depict depressed female figures reflecting artistic angst and a new discourse within language for articulating pain. 

Fatal Attractions, Abjection, and the Self in Literature from the Restoration to the Romantics (2019) 

This book examines Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection in several works by early British writers from the Restoration to the Romantic era. This period saw an increased emphasis on understanding the self. Poems with anxious speakers or narratives featuring characters with considerable psychic pressures emerged as writers responded to ideas on consciousness by natural philosophers. The pursuit of self-knowledge also reached greater imaginative depths, inspiring new artistic movements, including sensibility, with its attention to expressions of the suffering self, and the Gothic, a mode of art that examines the self’s deepest fears. Romantic writers theorized about artistic genius, creating a cult of the self that has never left us. Kristeva offers a more complete psychoanalytic vocabulary for understanding the self’s unconscious motivations in literature written during this period, and this book provides readers interested in early British literature, philosophy, and literary theory with a constructive perspective for thinking about literary depictions of the self-in-crisis.

Lucretian Thought in Late Stuart England: Debates about the Nature of the Soul (2013)

How did writers understand the soul in late seventeenth-century England? This book considers depictions of the soul in literary texts that engage with Lucretius's Epicurean philosophy in De rerum natura or through the writings of the most important natural philosopher to disseminate Epicurean atomism in England, Walter Charleton (1619-1707).

Dangerous Women, Libertine Epicures, and the Rise of Sensibility, 1670-1730 (2011)

In the first full-length study of the figure of the female libertine in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century literature, this book examines heroines appearing in literature by John Dryden, Aphra Behn, Catharine Trotter, Delariviere Manley, and Daniel Defoe. Linker argues that this figure, partially inspired by Epicurean ideas found in Lucretius's De rerum natura, interrogates gender roles and assumptions and emerges as a source of considerable tension during the late Stuart and early Georgian periods. Witty and rebellious, the female libertine becomes a frequent satiric target because of her transgressive sexuality. As a result of negative portrayals of lady libertines, women writers begin to associate their libertine heroines with the pathos figures they read in French texts of sensibilité. Beginning with a discussion of Charles II's mistresses, Linker shows that these women continue to serve as models for the female libertine in literature long after their "reigns" at court ended. Her study places the female libertine within her cultural, philosophical, and literary contexts and suggests new ways of considering women's participation and the early novel, which prominently features female libertines as heroines of sensibility.