Women and Literature in Britain, 1700–1800

by Edited by Vivien Jones

• ISBN13: 9780521586801
• ISBN10: 0521586801
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-03-13
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Women and Literature in Britain, 1700-1800 is unique in providing an authoritative, up-to-date overview of eighteenth-century women's writing and its contexts. The contributors are well-known feminist literary critics, cultural historians and historians of publishing. They discuss the construction of women, and women's writing across a wide range of genres, including essays on ideas of femininity, women and race, changing family structures, women and the law, and women as publishers and as readers. This book will be an invaluable resource both for students and experts in the field.

Author Biography

Ros Ballaster is a Fellow in English Literature at Mansfield College, Oxford University. Clare Brant is a Lecturer at King's College London. Margaret Anne Doody is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Dianne Dugaw is a professor of English at the University of Oregon. Jan Fergus is a professor of English at Lehigh University. Isobel Grundy taught for many years at Queen Mary College, London University. Since 1990 she has been Henry Marshall Tory Professor at the University of Alberta, Canada. Harriet Guest is a senior lecturer in the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of York. Vivien Jones is a senior lecturer in the School of English, University of Leeds. Paula Mcdowell is associate professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. Felicity A. Nussabaum, Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. Ruth Perry is Professor of Literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Gillian Skinner was a Visiting Associate Professor at California State University, Hayward, and she is currently a Tutor and Scholar-in-Residence at St Chad's College, University of Durham. Angela J. Smallwood lectures in eighteenth-century English literature at the University of Nottingham and held a British Academy Research Readership 1991-93 in order to work on women playwrights. Kathryn Sutherland is Reader in Bibliography and Textual Criticism and Professorial Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	vii
List of contributors	viii
Acknowledgements	xi
Chronology	xii
Introduction	1	(24)
Vivien Jones
PART I CONSTRUCTING WOMEN IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FEMININITIES
Writing on education and conduct: arguments for female improvement	25	(21)
Kathryn Sutherland
Eighteenth-century femininity: `a supposed sexual character'	46	(23)
Harriet Guest
Women and race: `a difference of complexion'	69	(22)
Felicity A. Nussbaum
WOMEN, FAMILY, AND THE LAW
Women's status as legal and civic subjects: `A worse condition than slavery itself'?	91	(20)
Gillian Skinner
Women in families: the great disinheritance	111	(24)
Ruth Perry
WOMEN AND PRINT
Women and the business of print	135	(20)
Paula McDowell
Women readers: a case study	155	(24)
Jan Fergus
PART II: WRITING WOMEN IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
(Re)discovering women's texts	179	(18)
Isobel Grundy
Women and the rise of the novel: sexual prescripts	197	(20)
Ros Ballaster
Women poets of the eighteenth century	217	(21)
Margaret Anne Doody
Women and the theatre	238	(25)
Angela J. Smallwood
Women and popular culture: gender, cultural dynamics, and popular prints	263	(22)
Dianne Dugaw
Varieties of women's writing	285	(21)
Clare Brant
Guide to further reading	306	(5)
Index	311