This bibliography lists 20th-century literary criticism of 35 18th- century Anglo-American women novelists, including Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth, and Frances Burney. Novelists are ordered alphabetically; each section begins with a list of the author's published fiction, followed by chronologically ordered summaries of critical articles, papers, theses, and dissertations. Summaries list the name of the critic, the title, the publisher, and the page, if applicable. Most summaries are one or two sentences long; the longer ones contain quotations from the critical writing. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Examining the appropriations and revisions of Indian identity first carried out by Anglo-American engravers and later by early Anglo-American women writers, Cathy Rex shows the ways in which iconic images of Native figures inform not only an emerging colonial/early republican American identity but also the authorial identity of white women writers. Women such as Mary Rowlandson, Ann Eliza Bleecker, Lydia Maria Child, and the pseudonymous Unca Eliza Winkfield of The Female American, Rex argues, co-opted and revised images of Indianness such as those found in the Massachusetts Bay Colony seal and the numerous variations of Pocahontas’s image based on Simon Van de Passe’s original 1616 engraving. Doing so allowed them to posit their own identities and presumed superiority as American women writers. Sometimes ugly, occasionally problematic, and often patently racist, the Indian writings of these women nevertheless question the masculinist and Eurocentric discourses governing an American identity that has always had Indianness at its core. Rather than treating early American images and icons as ancillary to literary works, Rex places them in conversation with one another, suggesting that these well-known narratives and images are mutually constitutive. The result is a new, more textually inclusive perspective on the field of early American studies.

The 18th century in Britain was a transition period for literature. Patronage, either by a benefactor or through subscription, lingered even as the publishing and bookselling industries developed. The practice of reviewing books became well established during the second half of the century, with the first periodical founded in 1749. For the literary scholar, these gradual changes mean that different search strategies are required to conduct research into primary and secondary source material across the era. Literary Research and the British Eighteenth Century addresses these unique challenges. It examines how the following all contribute to the richness of literary research for this era: book and periodical publishing; a growing literate society; dissemination of literature through salons, private societies, and coffee houses; the growing importance of book reviews; the explosion of publishing; and the burgeoning of primary source material available through new publishing and digital initiatives in the 21st century. This volume explores primary and secondary resources, including general literary research guides; union library catalogs; print and online bibliographies; scholarly journals; manuscripts and archives; 18th-century books, newspapers, and periodicals; contemporary reception; and electronic texts and journals, as well as Web resources. Each chapter addresses the research methods and tools best used to extract relevant information and compares and evaluates sources, making this book an invaluable guide to any literary scholar and student of the British eighteenth century.

The English novel written between 1700 and 1740 remains a comparatively neglected area. In addition to Daniel Defoe, whose Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders are landmarks in the history of English fiction, many other authors were at work. These included such women as Penelope Aubin, Jane Barker, Mary Davys, and Eliza Haywood, who made a considerable contribution to widening the range of emotional responses in fiction. These authors, and many others, continued writing in the genres inherited from the previous century, such as criminal biographies, the Utopian novel, the science fictional voyage, and the epistolary novel. This annotated bibliography includes entries for these works and for critical materials pertinent to them. The volume first seeks to establish the existing studies of the era, along with anthologies. It then provides entries for a wide-ranging selection of works which cover fictional, theoretical, historical, political, and cultural topics, to provide a comprehensive background to the unfolding and understanding of prose fiction in the early 18th century. This is followed by an alphabetical listing of novels, their editions, and any critical material available on each. The next section provides a chronological record of significant and enduring works of fiction composed or translated in this period. The volume concludes with extensive indexes.

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Eliza Haywood (1693?-1756) was one of the first women in England to earn a living writing fiction. Her early tales of amorous intrigue, sometimes based on real people, were exceedingly popular though controversial. Haywood, along with her contemporary Daniel Defoe, did more than any other writer to create a market for fiction in the period just prior to the emergence of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Tobias Smollett, the dominant novelists of the mid-eighteenth century. The scheming, sexually predatory anti-heroine of The Injur'd Husband is a memorable villain who defies all expectations of a woman's conduct in marriage. The heroine of Lasselia is initially a model of virtue who bravely resists the advances of a king, only to be driven by her passion and desire into an illicit affair with a married man and ultimately into ruin. These two provocative narratives strikingly represent Haywood's extraordinary contribution to the development of the novel.

Devoted to the study of women from 1660 to 1817 (the so-called 'long' 18th century).

Susanna Rowson--novelist, actress, playwright, poet, school founder, and early national celebrity--bears little resemblance to the title character in her most famous creation, Charlotte Temple. Yet this best-selling novel has long been perceived as the prime exemplar of female passivity and subjugation in the early Republic. Marion Rust disrupts this view by placing the novel in the context of Rowson's life and other writings. Rust shows how an early form of American sentimentalism mediated the constantly shifting balance between autonomy and submission that is key to understanding both Rowson's work and the lives of early American women. Rust proposes that Rowson found a wide female audience in the young Republic because she articulated meaningful female agency without sacrificing accountability to authority, a particularly useful skill in a nation that idealized womanhood while denying women the most basic rights. Rowson, herself an expert at personal reinvention, invited her readers, theatrical audiences, and students to value carefully crafted female self-presentation as an instrument for the attainment of greater influence. Prodigal Daughters demonstrates some of the ways in which literature and lived experience overlapped, especially for women trying to find room for themselves in an increasingly hostile public arena.

A Companion to the Eighteenth-century Novel furnishes readers with a sophisticated vision of the eighteenth-century novel in its political, aesthetic, and moral contexts. An up-to-date resource for the study of the eighteenth-century novel Furnishes readers with a sophisticated vision of the eighteenth-century novel in its political, aesthetic, and moral context Foregrounds those topics of most historical and political relevance to the twenty-first century Explores formative influences on the eighteenth-century novel, its engagement with the major issues and philosophies of the period, and its lasting legacy Covers both traditional themes, such as narrative authority and print culture, and cutting-edge topics, such as globalization, nationhood, technology, and science Considers both canonical and non-canonical literature

This collection of early works by Eliza Haywood includes the well-known novella Fantomina (1725) along with three other short, highly engaging Haywood works: The Tea-Table (1725), Reflections on the Various Effects of Love (1726), and Love-Letters on All Occasions (1730). In these writings, Haywood arouses the vicarious experience of erotic love while exploring the ethical and social issues evoked by sexual passion. This Broadview edition includes an introduction that focuses on Haywood’s life and career and on the status of prose fiction in the early eighteenth century. Also included are appendices of contextual materials from the period comprising writings by Haywood on female conduct, eighteenth-century pornography (from Venus in the Cloister), and a source text (Nahum Tate’s A Present for the Ladies).