“From Manuscript to Print and Back Again: Two Verse Miscellanies by Eighteenth-century Women.” Literary Manuscripts: 17th and 18th Century Literary Poetry from the Brotherton Library. University of Leeds. Adam Matthew Publications, 2006. (Commissioned) (original) (raw)
There was a time not too long ago when literary scholars would have been puzzled to name any eighteenthcentury women poets, but the bibliographical and scholarly work of a generation of feminist scholars has sufficiently proven that many, many women before Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote poetry. Roger Lonsdale's important anthology Eighteenth-Century Women Poets includes the work of ninety-three named authors in addition to many anonymous poets. Judith Phillips Stanton records that women of the eighteenthcentury published more books of poetry than any other genre, including the novel.
Sign up for access to the world's latest research.
checkGet notified about relevant papers
checkSave papers to use in your research
checkJoin the discussion with peers
checkTrack your impact
Related papers
Lost and Found: the Woman Writer in the Eighteenth Century
Gender <html_ent glyph="@amp;" ascii="&"/> History, 2003
A book addressing English literary history between 1380 and 1589 would not normally, perhaps, suggest other than a specialist readership and would not obviously take its place in a review of books concerned mostly with the eighteenth century. Jennifer Summit's Lost Property is an exception. This is a major intervention in historicised debates about women and writing which has implications for how we think about 'the woman writer' in all periods and across genres. Summit's period marks the beginnings of print culture, which is also the beginning of the cultural construction of the author and of literary tradition. She argues that in its very formation, English literature defined itself to a remarkable extent around the idea of the 'lost' woman writer; and that this figure which subsequent generations took at face value was, even in its inception, essentially rhetorical or mythical. To put it crudely (which Summit does not) the mythical element acquired a life of its own, complicating the activities of actual writing women and pervading subsequent representations of women as writers.
Jadavpur University Essays and Studies (Eighteenth-Century Crossovers), 2020
This essay discusses some of the “women’s advocacy” texts produced by Englishwomen in verse and prose from 1686–1799, with special emphasis on Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger’s The Female Geniad (1774). These texts, especially Benger’s, are read with some of Anne Finch’s less-discussed poems about writing and literary reception. Finch did not produce an advocacy text in the “female worthies” tradition, but explored the anxieties and desires that are embedded in the literary act for a woman writer. Curiously, Benger’s project of constructing a female literary canon in verse does not recognize Finch as an important foremother. While all of these voices champion female liberty, Finch’s advocacy is subtler and requires resistant reading. A consideration of such writers appropriating the “great men” tradition for themselves across the period reveal interesting insights into the changing modes of female poetics and the woman writer’s perception of the creative self within patriarchal generic discourses.
Turn of the Century Women's Poetry: Skirting the Problems of Periodization
This essay proposes a paradigm shift in the way we analyze late-nineteenth century women's poetry. The ongoing recovery of late-Victorian women poets has both enabled and invigorated the study of women's poetry, and to accommodate and understand these new voices, scholars have offered two major conceptual categories: " female aesthetes " and " new woman poets. " These models have proved useful but the more scholars have worked with them, the more they have seen the need for additional or alternate descriptive categories. Addressing periodization and arguing that it is especially problematic in regard to late-century women poets, this essay proposes a new period category—turn of the century women's poetry—wedded to a new formalist approach. This reconceptualization has multiple benefits: an alternative for theorizing women's poetry that does not depend on the domestic/poetess model; a non-deterministic period category that does not smooth over contradictions and oppositions; a frame for the recovered voices of women poets that accommodates their differences while accounting for their coherence; and a vision that looks both to the past and toward the future for a clearer picture of women's poetic production.(1) In order to establish the value of looking toward the Edwardian era when interpreting the social and institutional forms represented in turn of the century women's poetry, the essay outlines some post-1900 forms and contexts that both emerge from and provide critical frames of reference for poems of the earlier period. The essay offers readings of poems by Dollie Radford and Edith Nesbit to illustrate the ways in which current critical categories fail many women's poems, and closes with a discussion of works by Alice Meynell, May Kendall, and A. Mary F. Robinson that demonstrate the value of looking both forward and back when interpreting turn of the century women's poetry.
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.
Related papers
Irish Literature in Transition, 1830-1880: Volume 3, edited by Matthew Campbell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020)., 2020