Virginia Woolf described fictions as 'grossly material things', rooted in their physical and economic contexts. This book takes Woolf's hint as its starting point, asking who made the books of the English Renaissance. It recovering the ways in which women participated as co-authors, editors, translators, patrons, printers, booksellers, and readers.
A Concise Companion to Shakespeare and the Text introduces the early editions, editing practices, and publishing history of Shakespeare’s plays and poems, and examines their influence on bibliographic studies as a whole. The first single-volume book to provide an accessible and authoritative introduction to Shakespearean bibliographic studies Includes a helpful introduction, notes on Shakespeare’s texts, and a useful bibliography Contributors represent both leading and emerging scholars in the field Represents an unparalleled resource for both students and faculty
Economic Imperatives for Women’s Writing in Early Modern Europe addresses the central question of the professionalization of women’s writing before the eighteenth-century from a comparatist perspective, offering intriguing case studies on as yet an underdeveloped area in early modern studies.
This book explores the collaborative practices – both literary and material – that women undertook in the production of early modern texts. It confronts two ongoing methodological dilemmas. How does conceiving women’s texts as collaborations between authors, readers, annotators, editors, printers, and patrons uphold or disrupt current understandings of authorship? And how does reconceiving such texts as collaborative illuminate some of the unresolved discontinuities and competing agendas in early modern women’s studies? From one perspective, viewing early modern women’s writing as collaborative seems to threaten the hard-won legitimacy of the authors we have already recovered; from another, developing our understanding of literary agency beyond capital “A” authorship opens the field to the surprising range of roles that women played in the history of early modern books. Instead of trying to simply shift, disaggregate or adjudicate between competing claims for male or female priority in the production of early modern texts, Gender, Authorship, and Early Modern Women’s Collaboration investigates the role that gender has played – and might continue to play – in understanding early modern collaboration and its consequences for women’s literary history.
This collection examines the diverse material cultures through which early modern women's writing was produced, transmitted, and received. It focuses on the ways it was originally packaged and promoted, how it circulated in its contemporary contexts, and how it was read and received in its original publication and in later revisions and redactions.
Word of Mouth focuses on the two most prominent women in British modernism, Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. Both wrote with an extraordinary and sometimes celebratory self-consciousness about their status as "women writers". At odds with their explicit privileging of female difference, however, are patterns of imagery that demonstrate self-revulsion and self-hatred, the woman writer's rejection of herself. Patricia Moran points out that strategies of resistance and challenge are also strategies of repudiation and revulsion directed at female embodiment. Word of Mouth reevaluates Mansfield and Woolf, focusing on the figures of the anorexic and the hysteric and on the extensive imagery of eating, feeding, starvation, suffocation, flesh, and longing that permeates both fictional and nonfictional texts; it locates this writing within the overlapping frames of psychoanalytic theory, studies of women and eating disorders, and feminist work on women's anxiety of authorship.
This is a study of modernism, sexuality, and subjectivity in the work of two leading women modernists. Each confronted the aspects of her culture and personal history that resulted in a degraded sense of female sexuality and explored how traumatic childhood sexual experiences informed their relationship to female corporeality and fiction-writing.
This volume marks a shift. For it reveals how literary semiotics at present has moved toward methodological pluralism. The sharp lines of division, especially between the two most dominant approaches, those of C.S. Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure, have dissolved and a manifest synergy has emerged from the deepening appreciating that the focal concern of literary scholarship is irreducibly heterogeneous. This heterogeneity necessitates a variety of approaches. The significance of literary texts is neither entirely identifiable with authorial intention nor susceptible to empirical verification. Even so, the possibility of shared meaning and mutual understanding, whether or not acknowledged, animates the work of literary scholars. Approaches and theories in which communication and representation are explained, rather than explained away, deserve a fuller hearing than they have received in the recent past. The contributors to this volume highlight the communicative functions of literary texts and, more controversially, the representational possibilities secured by literary production.
Modern British and Irish Criticism and Theory offers the student and general reader a comprehensive, critically informed overview of the development of literary and cultural studies from the nineteenth century to the present day. Beginning with Coleridge and Arnold, examining the contribution of cultural commentators and novelists, and considering the institutionalisation of literary criticism in the universities of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, the book addresses in detailed, accessible and rigorous essays the rise and significance of literary and cultural studies. Nearly thirty essays contribute to an understanding of the practice of literary studies presenting the reader with a perceptive series of critical interventions which, themselves, engage in the very locations from which criticism and theory have emerged.A further reading list accompanies each chapter.
