Gender Studies and Eighteenth‐Century British Literature

The eighteenth century was a period of vital importance for the development of women's poetry: with each passing decade, more women began to read and write verse in every available genre and form. Since the late 1980s, this poetry has become increasingly accessible, and individual women poets have been thoroughly integrated into academic research and teaching. This essay provides an overview of recent scholarship on eighteenth‐century women's poetry. It begins by outlining broad trends in women's literary history which have shaped the field, before highlighting the unique challenges that women's poetry presents. It then offers a more focused survey of recently published scholarship, with an emphasis on the last 2 decades. Emerging research themes span from the growth in book history and manuscript investigations, to the resurgence of formalist interpretation. Studies of women's poetry have allowed scholars not only to reassess women's contributions to eighteenth‐century literary history, but to reconsider the very nature of that history—by re‐envisioning how and why poetry was written, innovated, circulated, published, read, and valued within the period. The essay concludes by proposing future directions for the field, including the need for continued recovery work, more critical editions and monograph studies, new methodologies, cross‐period dialogues with scholars of early modern and Romantic women's poetry, and practical initiatives to support precarious early career researchers.

Section: Women's Literary History and Women's Poetrymentioning

confidence: 99%

Recent scholarship on eighteenth‐century women's poetry

Keown¹

2021

“…Aphra Behn and Frances Burney have volumes dedicated to their work, and essays on Lucy Hutchinson, Margaret Cavendish, Women Playwrights, Katherine Phillips, Eliza Haywood, Women’s poetry and many female novelists can be found in various volumes cited in the bibliography. Toni Bowers’ essay ‘Gender Studies and Eighteenth‐century British Literature’ (2007) and Betty A. Schellenberg’s‘Writing Eighteenth‐century Women’s Literary History, 1986–2006’ (2007) provide excellent bibliographies on further recent scholarship and would themselves make useful reading assignments for students. Additionally, I often use the following as recommended texts for students to purchase: Vivien Jones’ collection Women and Literature in Britain 1700–1800 which contains the cited essays by Brant and Grundy and many others; Amanda Vickery’s social history The Gentleman’s Daughter, a delightfully written investigation of letters and diaries of actual 18th century English gentry women; and Ruth Perry’s interdisciplinary study of the 18th century family Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture 1748–1818 .…”

Section: Are There Other Teaching Resources Available?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the 20 years since I began teaching, the field has expanded greatly both in terms of scholarly attention and availability of classroom texts, though it lags behind Romantic and Renaissance women in the latter. As Toni Bowers and Betty Schellenberg demonstrate in recent LC articles, the very structure of literary history has shifted considerably to make room for and understand the contributions of women from the long 18th century, and the process is far from being over. Given the flux, this particular historical moment may be messy, but it is possible and, indeed, important to open up the space to discuss how we teach 18th century women.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Teaching Eighteenth‐Century Women Writers

Runge

2010

Although the availability of classroom texts and scholarship on 18th century British women writers has grown substantially in the past 20 years, little has been written about the classroom experience. This essay surveys the questions and materials that shape the teaching of female authors from Behn to Barbauld (roughly 1660–1800). Beginning with the arguments on recovery and esthetic or cultural appreciation, the essay reviews available texts (paper and digital sources), organization and methods of teaching, and further resources for the instructor. Throughout, the essay includes strategies for recursive critical reading and achieving general education learning objectives, thus demonstrating how the classroom can be used as a critical space for feminist recovery of early women writers.

Writing Eighteenth‐Century Women's Literary History, 1986 to 2006

Schellenberg

2007

Under the influence of feminist theory and criticism, the late 1980s saw a flowering of literary histories of eighteenth‐century women writers. This work was very influential in assuming the existence of a distinct women's literary history conditioned by an increasingly rigid gender ideology of the time, in focusing on the novel genre, and in creating appreciation for the more recognizably feminist writers of the early and latter portions of the ‘long eighteenth century’. Subsequent work questioned the dependence of these histories on the ‘separate spheres’ model of gender, on a limited group of genres associated with women and with the literary, and on notions of feminism congenial to the late‐twentieth‐century critic. More broadly, feminist generalizations of women's experience were challenged by the rise of class, race and sexuality studies, while the very enterprise of historiography was placed under suspicion by postmodernist criticism of master narratives and of claims to objective interpretation of evidence. In response, studies of eighteenth‐century women's writing began to attend to a broader range of genres and spheres of action within the larger field of print culture, as well as to produce more nuanced studies of individual writers and the conditions within which they wrote. However, general literary studies remained dependent on the models of the 1980s, while writers seemed reluctant to write new literary histories. Only recently are there indications of a return to large‐scale women's literary histories. This return revises the pioneering work of the 1980s by attending to new, detailed studies of numerous individual writers, expanding generic coverage, incorporating electronic resources, experimenting with inclusive studies of male and female writers, and reconsidering questions of literary value.