Mavis Reimer
Professor
English
University of Winnipeg
Canada
Biography
Mavis Reimer’s M.A. thesis focused on the figure of fortune in Renaissance and Jacobean drama. Then, during her after-hours reading as a new mother, Mavis became interested in the relations between power and value, aesthetics and ideology, reading practices and meaning making. As a consequence, Mavis’s focus changed, in her doctoral work, to the study of texts designed for young readers. In her dissertation, Mavis looked at school stories that L. T. Meade had written in the context of first-wave feminist campaigns. Currently, Mavis considers how texts for young people reveal and produce the terms of societal consensus and solicit the agreement of readers with these terms. This enables her to focus on the dominant modes of seeing and shaping the world in a culture, as well as the shifts in societal consensus over time. Mavis’s interests in the texts and cultures of young people move between the historical and the contemporary, the international and the local.
Research Interest
Theories of young people’s texts and cultures; Canadian texts for young people; Victorian literature; collaborative research methods
