Mapping the relationship between gender and space in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British literature, this collection explores new cartographies, both geographic and figurative. In addition to incisive analyses of specific works, a group of essays on Charlotte Smith’s novels and a group of essays on natural philosophy offer case studies for exploring issues of gender and space within larger fields, such as an author’s oeuvre or a discourse.
Between 1660 and 1820, Great Britain experienced significant structural transformations in class, politics, economy, print, and writing that produced new and varied spaces and with them, new and reconfigured concepts of gender. In mapping the relationship between gender and space in British literature of the period, this collection defines, charts, and explores new cartographies, both geographic and figurative. The contributors take up a variety of genres and discursive frameworks from this period, including poetry, the early novel, letters, and laboratory notebooks written by authors ranging from Aphra Behn, Hortense Mancini, and Isaac Newton to Frances Burney and Germaine de Staël. Arranged in three groups, Inside, Outside, and Borderlands, the essays conduct targeted literary analysis and explore the changing relationship between gender and different kinds of spaces in the long eighteenth century. In addition, a set of essays on Charlotte Smith’s novels and a set of essays on natural philosophy offer case studies for exploring issues of gender and space within larger fields, such as an author’s oeuvre or a particular discourse. Taken together, the essays demonstrate space’s agency as a complement to historical change as they explore how literature delineates the gendered redefinition, occupation, negotiation, inscription, and creation of new spaces, crucially contributing to the construction of new cartographies in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England.
Tracing the continuities and trends in the complex relationship between literature and science in the long nineteenth century, this companion provides scholars with a comprehensive, authoritative and up-to-date foundation for research in this field. In intellectual, material and social terms, the transformation undergone by Western culture over the period was unprecedented. Many of these changes were grounded in the growth of science. Yet science was not a cultural monolith then any more than it is now, and its development was shaped by competing world views. To cover the full range of literary engagements with science in the nineteenth century, this companion consists of twenty-seven chapters by experts in the field, which explore crucial social and intellectual contexts for the interactions between literature and science, how science affected different genres of writing, and the importance of individual scientific disciplines and concepts within literary culture. Each chapter has its own extensive bibliography. The volume as a whole is rounded out with a synoptic introduction by the editors and an afterword by the eminent historian of nineteenth-century science Bernard Lightman.
Spaces for Feeling explores how English and Scottish people experienced sociabilities and socialities from 1650 to 1850, and investigates their operation through emotional practices and particular spaces. The collection highlights the forms, practices, and memberships of these varied spaces for feeling in this two hundred year period and charts the shifting conceptualisations of emotions that underpinned them. The authors employ historical, literary, and visual history approaches to analyse a series of literary and art works, emerging forms of print media such as pamphlet propaganda, newspapers, and periodicals, and familial and personal sources such as letters, in order to tease out how particular communities were shaped and cohered through distinct emotional practices in specific spaces of feeling. This collection studies the function of emotions in group formations in Britain during a period that has attracted widespread scholarly interest in the creation and meaning of sociabilities in particular. From clubs and societies to families and households, essays here examine how emotional practices could sustain particular associations, create new social communities and disrupt the capacity of a specific cohort to operate successfully. This timely collection will be essential reading for students and scholars of the history of emotions.
The handbook offers a comprehensive introduction to the British novel in the long eighteenth century, when this genre emerged to develop into the period’s most versatile and popular literary form. Part I features six systematic chapters that discuss literary, intellectual, socio-economic, and political contexts, providing innovative approaches to issues such as sense and sentiment, gender considerations, formal characteristics, economic history, enlightened and radical concepts of citizenship and human rights, ecological ramifications, and Britain’s growing global involvement. Part II presents twenty-five analytical chapters that attend to individual novels, some canonical and others recently recovered. These analyses engage the debates outlined in the systematic chapters, undertaking in-depth readings that both contextualize the works and draw on relevant criticism, literary theory, and cultural perspectives. The handbook’s breadth and depth, clear presentation, and lucid language make it attractive and accessible to scholar and student alike.
The volume investigates the ‘voice’ of women writers in the development of literary studies, and interrogates how scholars read and teach women’s literary texts. These issues are still crucial for women’s and gender studies today and deserve to be properly investigated and constantly updated. The various essays collected here examine how, and to what extent, ‘women’, across time and space, experimented with new genres or forms of expression in order to transform, question, resist or paradoxically consolidate gender discriminations and dominant ideologies: patriarchy, colonialism, slavery and racism, imperialism, religion, and (hetero)sexuality. Women’s Voices and Genealogies in Literary Studies in English is addressed to MA and PhD students in women’s and gender studies, and to all those students or young scholars who are interested in gender methodologies as a mode of practice in literary criticism and analysis. The authors of the volume share a long-standing experience in women’s and gender studies and in teaching English women’s literature, literary criticism and feminist methodologies and theories to students from different national origins.
The female authors highlighted in this monograph represent a special breed of science writer, women who not only synthesized the science of their day (often drawing upon their own direct experience in the laboratory, field, classroom, and/or public lecture hall), but used their works to simultaneously educate, entertain, and, in many cases, evangelize. Women played a central role in the popularization of science in the 19th century, as penning such works (written for an audience of other women and children) was considered proper "women's work." Many of these writers excelled in a particular literary technique known as the "familiar format," in which science is described in the form of a conversation between characters, especially women and children. However, the biological sciences were considered more “feminine” than the natural sciences (such as astronomy and physics), hence the number of geological “conversations” was limited. This, in turn, makes the few that were completed all the more crucial to analyze.
Once merely a footnote in Restoration and eighteenth-century studies and rarely taught, Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave (1688), by Aphra Behn, is now essential reading for scholars and a classroom favorite. It appears in general surveys and in courses on early modern British writers, postcolonial literature, American literature, women's literature, drama, the slave narrative, and autobiography. Part 1 of this volume, "Materials," provides not only resources for the teacher of Oroonoko but also a brief chronology of Behn's life and work. In part 2, "Approaches," essays offer a diversity of perspectives appropriate to a text that challenges student assumptions and contains not one story but many: Oroonoko as a romance, as a travel account, as a heroic tragedy, as a window to seventeenth-century representations of race, as a reflection of Tory-Whig conflict in the time of Charles II.
There is an unfortunate argument being made that feminist scholarship of eighteenth-century literary studies has fulfilled its potential in academic circles. The Future of Eighteenth-Century Feminist Scholarship: Beyond Recovery shows us otherwise. Each of the essays in this volume reaffirms the feminist principles that form the foundation of this area, then builds upon them by acknowledging the inevitable conflicts they or their subjects have faced and the contradictions they or their subjects have lived.
