A chronological sketch of the kinds of questions and methods characteristic of recent work in eighteenth-century gender studies, drawing on representative book-length studies as examples. It compares the histories and purposes of Women's Studies, Feminist Studies and Gender Studies, and concentrates on critical work dealing with early novels.Gender Studies and Eighteenth-Century British Literature . 937 and 'eighteenth-century studies' is understood to take in the broadest possible interdisciplinary and polyglot scholarship. When this article comes down to cases, though, it will concentrate mostly on the specific corner of that vast field that this writer knows best: gender-oriented studies of eighteenthcentury British prose fiction by (or sometimes, about) women.This contracted emphasis is most certainly not the result of any dearth of noteworthy gender-oriented studies of other genres and subjects: eighteenthcentury poetry, drama and/or performance studies, and non-fictional prose; eighteenth-century book production, distribution, and consumption; political and partisan history, art history, fashion history, religious history, performance history (all subjects once considered extra-literary but now firmly within the purview of literary scholarship); sexuality; or the literatures and cultures of the Americas, Continental Europe, or the East(s). 5 On the contrary, it is precisely the richness of gender studies in all these fields that leads me to bracket them out: each calls out for a review essay of its own. So although this article takes occasional note of work in these fields, and although it ventures a few general observations about eighteenth-century gender studies more broadly defined, I will most often be considering investigations among scholars of gender who are primarily interested in women's voices and representations in eighteenth-century British prose fiction. I offer that set of investigations to readers with different specialties, as a template for considerations of other eighteenth-century categories of difference -ethnic, racial, and class difference, differences of sexual orientation and religion, differences of age and geographical location, and so on.Even so, the quantity and variety of work to be considered remains formidably vast. To name only some of the larger categories of analysis of eighteenth-century British women's prose fiction: Scholars are working today on considerations of gender and authorship, gender and political authority, gender and domesticity, gender and genre -and education, and national identity, and commerce, and social class differences, and geographical exploration, and imperialism/empire, and sensibility, and aesthetics, and religion, and race, and the 'public/private spheres' (itself a highly contested formulation), and 'possessive individualism' (likewise), and partisan ideologies, and book production/distribution, and readership (readers' expectations, readers' habits, readers' demographics, etc.) -the list is potentially endless. And readers should remember that e...
