Women And Literary History For There She Was

by Binhammer, Katherine; Wood, Jeanne

• ISBN13: 9780874138245
• ISBN10: 0874138248
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-05-01
• Publisher: University of Delaware Press

Summary

These essays by internationally renowned feminist scholars rethink the methods and content of contemporary feminist history. The vibrant work of feminist literary historians in the last three decades has produced a new archive of knowledge on women's writing and new narratives of the cultural past. But, these essays ask, where has this revisioning taken us? Examining the legacy of both traditional literary history and second-wave history of women's writing, the essays collected in Women and Literary History answer that question by querying received ideas about chronology and nationality as foundations for literary history, by challenging the standard form of reading women's writing in isolation from men's, and by contesting the project of recovering "lost" women writers.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	7	(2)
Introduction: Feminist Literary Historiography	9	(18)
Katherine Binhammer
Susan Brown
Patricia Clements
Isobel Grundy
Jeanne Wood
Yarhound, Horrion, and the Horse-Headed Tartar: Editing Jane Sharp's The Midwives Book (1671)	27	(16)
Elaine Hobby
Cowley Among the Women: or, Poetry in the Contact Zone	43	(21)
Kathryn R. King
``Lesbian'' Literary History in the Eighteenth Century	64	(10)
Sally O'Driscoll
Beyond Feminist Literary History?: Re-Historicizing the Mid-Eighteenth-Century Woman Writer	74	(18)
Betty A. Schellenberg
Terminus a Quo, Terminus ad Quem: Chronological Boundaries in a Literary History	92	(14)
Susan Staves
``A considerable rank in the world of Belles Lettres'': Women, Fiction, and Literary History in the Last Quarter of the Eighteenth Century	106	(13)
Antonia Forster
The Search for a Lost Atlantis: Feminist Paradigms, Narratives of Nation, and Genealogies of Victorian Women's Poetry and Anti-Slavery Writing	119	(33)
Marjorie Stone
Finding Phebe: A Literary History of Women's Science Writing	152	(15)
Ann B. Shteir
Recuperating from Modernism: Pauline Johnson's Challenge to Literary History	167	(20)
Carole Gerson
Literary History as Exorcism: May Sinclair Meets the Brontes	187	(14)
Suzanne Raitt
Women's Literary History in a Minor Key	201	(19)
Jo-Ann Wallace
Beyond (?) Feminist Recuperative Study	220	(15)
Bonnie Kime Scott
List of Contributors	235	(4)
Index	239