Criticism

“Exceeding Enclosure: National Parks and Indigenous Modernities”

Modernism/modernity · Forthcoming

“Thoreau's Antislavery Poetry”

Modern Language Studies · Vol. 51, Nos. 1 & 2, Winter 2022, pp. 34–57

"Thoreau's Antislavery Poetry" argues that Henry David Thoreau's poetry should be read not as marginal to his political thought but as a central expression of his abolitionist ethics and resistance to slavery. The article examines how Thoreau's verse links moral conscience, natural imagery, and political dissent, revealing poetry as a medium through which he confronted the violence, dehumanization, and spiritual corruption of slavery in nineteenth-century America. Situating Thoreau within broader antislavery literary culture, Schrimper shows how his poems fuse transcendentalist aesthetics with radical political commitment, extending the same moral urgency found in works like "Civil Disobedience" and his writings on John Brown.

“Queer Narrative Ecology in Margaret Fuller's 'The Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain' and Virginia Woolf's 'Kew Gardens'”

Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory · Vol. 77, No. 3, Fall 2021, pp. 101–20

Historically, scholars have not linked Margaret Fuller and Virginia Woolf. This essay acts as a transatlantic feminist recovery project, delineating Woolf's knowledge of Fuller, and how their experimental works subvert classical and romantic-chivalric literary precedents which they deem masculinist and foreclosing of possibility.

“'the young gentlemen talking in the room next door': Privileged Spaces in Jacob's Room”

Virginia Woolf Miscellany · No. 94, Winter 2019, pp. 25–27

“‘the young gentlemen talking in the room next door’: Privileged Spaces in Jacob’s Room” argues that Virginia Woolf uses rooms, universities, shops, and other physical spaces to expose the gendered and class-based inequalities embedded within British society. Through close readings of scenes at Cambridge, private residences, shops, and brothels, the article demonstrates how privileged male spaces are associated with education, intellectual authority, and institutional support, while women are repeatedly depicted in spaces of labor, exclusion, and bodily exploitation. Schrimper contends that Woolf’s portrayal of spatial division in Jacob’s Room anticipates the feminist critiques of education, patriarchy, and access developed more fully in A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas.

“Thoreau's Poetry and the New Materialism: A Matter of 'Enmeshedness'”

The Concord Saunterer: A Journal of Thoreau Studies · Vol. 26, 2018, pp. 55–78

"Thoreau's Poetry and the New Materialism: A Matter of 'Enmeshedness'" rereads Henry David Thoreau's poetry through the lens of new materialist theory, arguing that his verse imagines human life as fundamentally entangled with the material world. The article demonstrates how Thoreau's poems destabilize distinctions between subject and object, self and environment, emphasizing the agency, vitality, and interconnectedness of nonhuman matter. By positioning Thoreau as a precursor to contemporary ecological and materialist thought, Schrimper shows how the poetry anticipates present-day theories of relationality, embodiment, and environmental ethics.

“The Eye, the Mind, & the Spirit: Why 'the look of things' Held a 'great power' Over Virginia Woolf”

Journal of Modern Literature · Vol. 42, No. 1, Fall 2018, pp. 32–48

Virginia Woolf was fixated on vision, the actual act of seeing and the concentrated observation of objects and surroundings, so much so that she professed, “The look of things has a great power over me.” Utilizing a psychoanalytic framework put forth by Charles Mauron—adapted from Freud for Mauron’s study Introduction to the Psychoanalysis of Mallarmé—and examining predominantly but not solely moments of observation in To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, and the diaries, this article analyzes moments in which Woolf’s preoccupation with seeing makes itself visible, and explores why, precisely, the look of things held a great power over her.

“What Would Woolf Think About Her Presence in Biofiction?”

Virginia Woolf Miscellany · No. 93, Fall 2018, pp. 14–15

Schrimper argues that elements of Woolf's "work work" or her literary oeuvre are forwarded in contemporary biofiction, and posits that Woolf, ever anxious about her creative output being "destroyed," would have supported biofiction that pays homage to her art and so keeps it alive.

“Review of Public Land and Democracy in America: Understanding Conflict Over Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, by Julie Brugger”

Western American Literature · Forthcoming

“Review of Ornamental Aesthetics: The Poetry of Attending in Thoreau, Dickinson, & Whitman, by Theo Davis”

The Thoreau Society Bulletin · No. 304, Winter 2019, pp. 11–12

“Review of New Collected Poems of Marianne Moore, ed. Heather Cass White”

Women: A Cultural Review · Vol. 29, Issue 1, Spring 2018, pp. 129–33

“Review of Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast, by Megan Marshall”

Modernism/modernity · Vol. 24, No. 4, Nov. 2017, pp. 886–89