Harriett Bloker Hawkins

Background

Harriett Bloker was born on April 29, 1934, in Memphis, Tennessee, United States. She was the daughter of Robert Williams (a lawyer) and Genevieve (a schoolteacher; maiden name, Bloker) Hawkins.

Education

Harriett studied at Tulane University and received a Bachelor of Arts in 1960. She also studied at Washington University and received her Master of Arts in 1962 and Ph.D. in 1964. She also attended Oxford University in England and received a Master of Arts in 1982.

Career

Harriett started to work as an instructor in English at Swarthmore College during 1964-66. She also worked at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York as an assistant professor then as a professor of English during 1966-79. During her time at Vassar, Hawkins published her first two works, both of which gained her kudos for her knowledge in classical English literature. Her competence was rewarded with several honors, including fellowships with the American Council of Learned Societies in 1973 and the Guggenheim Foundation in 1975.

Reviewers hailed her Likenesses of Truth in Elizabethan and Restoration Drama. A. M. McLean of Library Journal called it a “well-written and intelligently argued study,” as well as an “important book.” A contributor to Choice felt Hawkins’ insights were “valuable for their crisp dismissal of current critical fads.”

Hawkins’ next effort, Poetic Freedom and Poetic Truth, concentrated on the works of the great English writers Chaucer, Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Milton in an attempt to show how poets have used their works to take on social orthodoxies. Essay titles include “Poetic Injustice,” “The Victim’s Side,” and “Of Their Vain Contest.” Again, as in her earlier work, Hawkins attacked modern critics who she believes to be moralistic. A Choice contributor called the book both “stimulating and brilliant.” The same critic went on to conclude that Hawkins’ essays “exhibit a perceptive mind with humanity and common sense.”

She was a senior research fellow at Linacre College, Oxford University, Oxford, England during 1986-95. Harriett worked at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia as a visiting professor of English in 1987. Besides, she worked at Open University as a Women’s Hour broadcaster in England during 1988-95.

Some of the author’s later works are Classics and Trash: Traditions and Taboos in High Literature and Popular Modern Genres (1990) and Strange Attractors: Literature, Culture, and Chaos Theory (1995), in which she brings chaos theory to bear on a range of texts from various sources, including popular literature, exploring the strange attraction between modern theories of deterministic chaos and current works inspired by chaos theory.

Achievements

• Harriett B. Hawkins was a longtime professor of English literature, who published several works that pertain to her research, including Likenesses of Truth in Elizabethan and Restoration Drama (1972) and the award-winning Poetic Freedom and Poetic Truth: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (1976). Hawkins’s teaching career began in 1964 at Pennsylvania’s Swarthmore College and lasted for more than 30 years.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Classics and Trash: Traditions and Taboos in High Literature and Popular Modern Genres

    (This work questions the distinction between "high" litera...)

    1990
  • Strange Attractors: Literature, Culture and Chaos Theory

    (Hawkins explores the strange attraction among modern theo...)

    1995
  • Likenesses Of Truth In Elizabethan And Restoration Drama 1972
  • Poetic Freedom and Poetic Truth: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton 1976

Views

Hawkins emphatically disputed the moral stance that many critics have taken when commenting on Elizabethan and Restoration drama. “The need to liberate discussions of seventeenth-century plays from the shackles which specific modem critical perspectives have clamped upon them calls for a frontal attack on specific critics,” Hawkins militantly wrote in the work’s preface.

Connections

On December 31, 1953, Harriett married Donn Frederick Yost, later, they divorced. On March 15, 1978, she married Eric Joseph Buckley.

Father:

Robert Williams Hawkins

Mother:

Genevieve (Bloker) Hawkins

Spouse:

Eric Joseph Buckley

ex-spouse:

Donn Frederick Yost

References

• Contemporary Authors, Vol. 184
  2000