This A-Z reference work provides the first comprehensive reference guide to the wide range of historical writing with which women have been involved, particularly since the Renaissance. The Companion covers biographical writing, travelogue and historical fictions, broadening the concept of history to include the forms of writing with which women have historically engaged. The focus is on women writing in English internationally, but historical and historiographical traditions from beyond the English-speaking world are also examined. Brief biographies of individual writers are included.
In 1788, the Catalogue of Five Hundred Celebrated Authors of Great Britain, Now Living forecast a form of authorship that rested on biographical revelation and media saturation as well as literary achievement. This collection traces the unique experiences of women writers within a celebrity culture that was intimately connected to the expansion of print technology and of visual and material culture in the nineteenth century. The contributors examine a wide range of artifacts, including prefaces, portraits, frontispieces, birthday books, calendars and gossip columns, to consider the nature of women's celebrity and the forces that created it. How did authors like Jane Austen, the Countess of Blessington, Louisa May Alcott, Alice Meynell, and Marie Corelli negotiate the increasing demands for public revelation of the private self? How did gender shape the posthumous participation of women writers such as Jane Austen, Ellen Wood, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Christina Rossetti in celebrity culture? These and other important questions related to the treatment of women in celebrity genres and media, and the strategies women writers used to control their public images, are taken up in this suggestive exploration of how nineteenth and early twentieth century women writers achieved popular, critical, and commercial success.
Chosen by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title Until recently, history writing has been understood as a male enclave from which women were restricted, particularly prior to the nineteenth century. The first book to look at British women writers and their contributions to historiography during the long eighteenth century, British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670-1820, asks why, rather than writing history that included their own sex, some women of this period chose to write the same kind of history as men—one that marginalized or excluded women altogether. But as Devoney Looser demonstrates, although British women's historically informed writings were not necessarily feminist or even female-focused, they were intimately involved in debates over and conversations about the genre of history. Looser investigates the careers of Lucy Hutchinson, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Charlotte Lennox, Catharine Macaulay, Hester Lynch Piozzi, and Jane Austen and shows how each of their contributions to historical discourse differed greatly as a result of political, historical, religious, class, and generic affiliations. Adding their contributions to accounts of early modern writing refutes the assumption that historiography was an exclusive men's club and that fiction was the only prose genre open to women.
The contributors, including such leading scholars as Vicki L. Ruiz, Jennifer Scanlon, and Miriam Formanek-Brunell, examine myriad ways in which a variety of discourses and activities from popular girls' magazines and advertisements to babysitting and the Girl Scouts help form girls' experiences of what it means to be a girl, and later a woman, in our society. The essays address such topics as board games and the socialization of adolescent girls, dolls and political ideologies, Nancy Drew and the Filipina American experience, the queering of girls' detective fiction, and female juvenile delinquency to demonstrate how cultural discourses shape both the young and teenage girl in America. Although girls' culture has until now received comparatively little attention from scholars, this work confirms that understanding the culture of girls is essential to understanding how gender works in our society. Making a significant contribution to a long-neglected area of social and cultural inquiry, Delinquents and Debutantes will be of central interest to those in women's studies, American studies, history, literature, and cultural studies.
This truly monumental work maps the literature of women's studies, covering thousands of titles and Web sites in 19 subject areas published between 1985 and 1999. Intended as a reference and collection development tool, this bibliography provides a guide for women's studies information for each title along with a detailed, often evaluative review. The annotations summarize each work's content, its importance or contribution to women's studies, and its relationship to other titles on the subject. Core titles and titles that are out of print are noted, and reviews indicate which titles are appropriate as texts or supplemental texts. This definitive guide to the literature of women's studies is a must-purchase for academic libraries that support women's studies programs, and it is a useful addition to any academic or public library that endeavors to represent the field. A team of subject specialists has taken on the immense task of documenting publications in the area of women's studies in the last decades of the 20th century. The result is this truly monumental work, which maps the field, covering thousands of titles and Web sites in 19 subject areas published between 1985 and 1999. Intended as a reference and collection development tool, this bibliography provides a guide for women's studies information for each title along with a detailed, often evaluative review. The annotations summarize each work's content, its importance or contribution to women's studies, and its relationship to other titles on the subject. Most reviews cite and describe similar and contrasting titles, substantially extending the coverage. Core titles and titles that are out of print are noted, and reviews indicate which titles are appropriate as texts or supplemental texts. Taking up where the previous volume by Loeb, Searing, and Stineman left off, this is the definitive guide to the literature of women's studies. It is a must purchase for academic libraries that support women's studies programs; and a welcome addition to any academic or public library that endeavors to represent the field.
The influence of the mass media on American history has been overwhelming. History of the Mass Media in the United States examines the ways in which the media both affects, and is affected by, U.S. society. From 1690, when the first American newspaper was founded, to 1995, this encyclopedia covers more than 300 years of mass media history. History of Mass Media in the United States contains more than 475 alphabetically arranged entries covering subjects ranging from key areas of newspaper history to broader topics such as media coverage of wars, major conflicts over press freedom, court cases and legislation, and the concerns and representation of ethnic and special interest groups. The editor and the 200 scholarly contributors to this work have taken particular care to examine the technological, legal, legislative, economic, and political developments that have affected the American media.