"Our sense of eighteenth-century poetic territory is immeasurably expanded by [this] excellent historical and cultural" study of UK women poets of the era (Cynthia Wall, Studies in English Literature).This major work offers a broad view of the writing and careers of eighteenth-century women poets, casting new light on the ways in which poetry was read and enjoyed, on changing poetic tastes in British culture, and on the development of many major poetic genres and t...

A revelatory history of the characters that playwrights and managers created out of the real lives of women in intimate relationships with military men to serve Great Britain's greatest needs during the war-saturated eighteenth century.During the long eighteenth century, Great Britain was almost continuously at war. As the era unfolded, the theatre gradually discovered the potential in having actresses, recently introduced to the stage in the 1660s, perform as wart...

Elizabeth Singer Rowe played a pivotal role in the development of the novel during the eighteenth century.Winner of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of the Choice ACRLElizabeth Singer Rowe and the Development of the English Novel is the first in-depth study of Rowe’s prose fiction. A four-volume collection of her work was a bestseller for a hundred years after its publication, but today Rowe is a largely unrecognized figure in the history of t...

Co-Winner, James Russell Lowell Prize, Modern Language AssociationThis major study offers a broad view of the writing and careers of eighteenth-century women poets, casting new light on the ways in which poetry was read and enjoyed, on changing poetic tastes in British culture, and on the development of many major poetic genres and traditions.Rather than presenting a chronological survey, Paula R. Backscheider explores the forms in which women wrote and the uses to which th...

In this book, Paula Backscheider considers Daniel Defoe's entire canon as related, developing, and in close dynamic relationship to the literature of its time. In so doing, she revises our conception of the contexts of Defoe's work and reassesses his achievement and contribution as a writer.By restoring a literary context for modern criticism, Backscheider argues the intensity and integrity of Defoe's artistic ambitions, demonstrating that everything he wrote rests solidly upon ext...

The ten essays in Literature and the Arts explore the intermedial plenitude of eighteenth-century English culture, honoring the memory of James Anderson Winn, whose work demonstrated how seeing that interplay of the arts and literature was essential to a full understanding of Restoration and eighteenth-century English culture. Scenery, machinery, music, dance, and texts transformed one another, both enriching and complicating generic distinctions. Artists were alive to the power o...

New Contexts for Eighteenth-Century British Fiction is a collection of thirteen essays honoring Professor Jerry C. Beasley, who retired from the University of Delaware in 2005. The essays, written by friends, collaborators and former students, reflect the scholarly interests that defined Professor Beasley's career and point to new directions of critical inquiry. The initial essays, which discuss Tobias Smollett, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, and Samuel Richardson, suggest new directions ...

This collection centers on the remarkable life and career of the writer and actor Elizabeth Inchbald (1753–1821), active in Great Britain in the late eighteenth century. Inspired by the example of Inchbald’s biographer, Annibel Jenkins (1918–2013), the contributors explore the broad historical and cultural context around Inchbald’s life and work, with essays ranging from the Restoration to the nineteenth century. Ranging from visual culture, theater history, literary analyses and to histor...

This anthology gathers 368 poems by 80 British women poets of the long eighteenth century. Few of these poems have been reprinted since originally published, and all are crucial to understanding fully the literary history of women writers.Paula R. Backscheider and Catherine E. Ingrassia demonstrate the enormous diversity of poetry produced during this time by organizing the poems in three broad and deliberately overlapping categories: by genre, establishing that women wrote in all ...

Frances Brooke (1724-1789), journalist, translator, playwright, novelist, and even co-manager of a theater, was described as "perhaps the first female novel-writer who attained a perfect purity and polish of style." Today, Brooke is known primarily for The History of Emily Montague, one of the earliest novels about Canada, where she lived for a number of years. But it is her third novel, The Excursion, that is an important example of the fashionable and popular English no...

The public and private spheres are conceived to be separate and complementary, useful in understanding human experience and social phenomena, gendered and perhaps "natural". Taking the usefulness of this model as a focus, these essays ask how the spheres interpenetrate.

Revising Women is a collection of essays by a distinguished group of feminist critics. Each essay is a contribution to the history of the English novel, to our understanding of literature's place in cultural debate, and to women's studies. The essays give steady attention to the ways novels participate in social processes and the ways women perceived the public sphere and stubbornly attempted to participate in it. Rich contextualization and adept use of theory reveal both the indi...