Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700-1830

Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700-1830
Author: Elizabeth Eger
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2001-01-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521771061

An international team of specialists examine the dynamic relation between women and the public sphere.

Spheres of Influence

Spheres of Influence
Author: Alex Benchimol
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2007
Genre: History
ISBN: 9783039105397

This book explores the ways in which intellectual and cultural publics from the early modern period to the postmodern present have actively constructed their cultural identities within the social processes of modernity. It brings together some of the most compelling recent writing on the public sphere by scholars in the fields of literary history, cultural studies and social theory from both sides of the Atlantic. Taken together, the essays in this collection offer a major re-examination of recent scholarship on the theory of the public sphere as developed by Jürgen Habermas. They also stand as a collective effort both to interrogate and to extend this influential model by exploring modern forms of intellectual and cultural activity in all their rich diversity and ideological complexity. Contributions range from the divided inheritance of Shakespeare publishing history to the new forms of mass-mediated cultural experience in contemporary Britain; from attempts at cultural regulation in the literary public sphere of the Romantic period to the postmodern political conflict played out in the American public sphere of the 1990s; and from varieties of religious dissent to modes of postcolonial criticism. The book furthers the dialogue between academic methodologies, fields and periods, and presents readers with a contested narrative of the key cultural and intellectual practices that have made up our modern world.

Gender and the Fictions of the Public Sphere, 1690-1755

Gender and the Fictions of the Public Sphere, 1690-1755
Author: Anthony Pollock
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2010-03-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 1135855919

Gender and the Fictions of the Public Sphere, 1690-1755, complicates our understanding of eighteenth-century English print culture by studying the journalistic work of women writers who have long been overlooked by scholars, and by re-interpreting texts by canonical male authors in the period as responses to these early feminist models of cultural authority.

Bluestockings Now!

Bluestockings Now!
Author: Deborah Heller
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2016-03-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317173597

Bringing together top specialists in the field, this edited volume challenges the theory that the eighteenth-century British intellectual women known as the Bluestockings were an isolated phenomenon spanning the period from the 1750s through the 1790s. On the contrary, the contributors suggest, the Bluestockings can be conceptualized as belonging to a chain of interconnected networks, taking their origin at a threshold moment in print media and communications development and extending into the present. The collection begins with a definition of the Bluestockings as a social role rather than a fixed group, a movement rather than a static phenomenon, an evolving dynamic reaching into our late-modern era. Essays include a rare transcript of a Bluestocking conversation; new, previously unknown Bluestockings brought to light for the first time; and descriptions of Bluestocking activity in the realms of natural history, arts and crafts, theatre, industry, travel, and international connections. The concluding essay argues that the Blues reimagined and practiced women’s work in ways that adapted to and altered the course of modernity, decisively putting a female imprint on economic, social, and cultural modernization. Demonstrating how the role of the Bluestocking has evolved through different historical configurations yet has structurally remained the same, the collection traces the influence of the Blues on the Romantic Period through the nineteenth century and proposes the reinvention of Bluestocking practice in the present.

Women and Authorship in Revolutionary America

Women and Authorship in Revolutionary America
Author: Angela Vietto
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2017-03-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351872419

Exploring the wealth of writings by early American women in a broad spectrum of genres, Women and Authorship in Revolutionary America presents one of the few synthetic approaches to early US women’s writing. Through an examination of the strategic choices writers made as they constructed their authorial identities at a moment when ideals of both Author and Woman were in flux, Angela Vietto argues that the relationship between gender and authorship was dynamic: women writers drew on available conceptions of womanhood to legitimize their activities as writers, and, often simultaneously, drew on various conceptions of authorship to authorize discursive constructions of gender. Focusing on the half-century surrounding the Revolution, this study ranges widely over both well-known and more obscure writers, including Mercy Otis Warren, Judith Sargent Murray, Sarah Wentworth Morton, Hannah Griffitts, Annis Boudinot Stockton, Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, Deborah Gannett, and Sarah Pogson Smith. The resulting analysis complicates and challenges a number of critical commonplaces, presenting instead a narrative of American literary history that presents the novel as women’s entrée into authorship; dichotomized views of civic and commercial authorship and of manuscript and print cultures; and a persistent sense that women of letters constantly struggled against a literary world that begrudged them entrance based on their gender.

The Concept and Practice of Conversation in the Long Eighteenth Century, 1688-1848

The Concept and Practice of Conversation in the Long Eighteenth Century, 1688-1848
Author: Katie Halsey
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2009-05-05
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1443810223

This collection of essays brings together eighteenth-century scholars from a variety of disciplines, to discuss conversation in the eighteenth century as concept and practice. At the heart of the volume is a simple question: are eighteenth-century conceptualisations of the role and purpose of conversation still relevant or useful to scholars and thinkers today? This volume contains essays by leading scholars of the period as well as early career researchers, and answers a need for a broad-ranging discussion of the concept of conversation in the arts, social sciences and humanities. The long eighteenth century is a particularly fruitful starting point for work on this topic, since ideas about conversation permeated all types of writing in this period, from the early forerunners of scientific textbooks to philosophical dialogues. The collection covers an exceptionally wide range of long-eighteenth-century authors, artists, lawmakers, texts and works of art, and, although the focus of the volume is largely on eighteenth-century Britain, the volume takes note of the rich relationships between continental European thought and British intellectual life in the period, and of the influence of British ideas in the newly independent American republic.

England's First Family of Writers

England's First Family of Writers
Author: Julie A. Carlson
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 515
Release: 2007-07-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0801891833

A collective consideration of Wollstonecraft, Godwin, and Shelley with “extended and sophisticated readings of many of [their] neglected works” (Choice). Life and literature were inseparable for Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and Mary Shelley. In England’s First Family of Writers, Julie A. Carlson demonstrates how and why the works of these individuals can best be understood within the context of the family unit in which they were created. The first to consider their writing collectively, Carlson finds in the Wollstonecraft-Godwin-Shelley dynasty a family of writers whose works are in intimate dialogue with each other. For them, literature made love and produced children, as well as mourned, memorialized, and reanimated the dead. Construing the ways in which this family’s works minimize the differences between books and persons, writing and living, Carlson offers a nonsentimental account of the extent to which books can live and inform life and death. Carlson also examines the unorthodox clan’s status as England’s first family of writers. She explores how, over time, their reception has evinced ongoing public resistance to those who critique family values.

Reading Gossip in Early Eighteenth-Century England

Reading Gossip in Early Eighteenth-Century England
Author: Nicola Parsons
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2015-12-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230244769

This book analyzes the relation between print cultures and eighteenth-century literary and political practices and, identifying Queen Anne's England as a crucial moment in the public life of gossip, offers readings of key texts that demonstrate how gossip's interpretative strategies shaped readers' participation in the literary and public spheres.

Women's Literary Networks and Romanticism

Women's Literary Networks and Romanticism
Author: Andrew O. Winckles
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2017
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1786940604

Andrew O. Winckles is Assistant Professor of CORE Curriculum (Interdisciplinary Studies) at Adrian College. Angela Rehbein is Associate Professor of English at West Liberty University.