This open access book explores the transnational and transoceanic dimensions of the debate on gender and women's cultural agency and mediation in the long eighteenth century. It aims to decenter perspectives on traditional Enlightenment geographies, by emphasizing cultural transfers between Southern Europe and the rest of Europe, as well as with the Americas; by focusing on a variety of cultural mediators—women authors, female (and male) translators, readers, travelers, and disseminators; and by examining diverse written and visual sources—from correspondence, travel narratives, and philosophical essays, to novels, opera, portraits. Mónica Bolufer is Professor of Modern History at the University of Valencia, Spain. She is the Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded research project CIRGEN: Circulating Gender in the Global Enlightenment: Ideas, Networks, Agencies. Laura Guinot-Ferri is Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Valencia, Spain, and part of the CIRGEN team. Carolina Blutrach is Senior Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Valencia, Spain, and part of the CIRGEN team.

Travel Writing and Cultural Transfer addresses the multifaceted concept of cultural transfer through travel writing, with the aim of expanding our knowledge of modes of travel in the past and present and how they developed, as did the way in which travel was reported. Travel as both factual and fictional— with authors and narratives moving between different worlds— is one of the many devices that demonstrate the fluidity of the genre. This fluidity accounts for the manifold and powerful influence of travel writing on processes of cultural transfer. This volume also illustrates that cultural transfer is frequently linked to issues of power, colonialism and politics. The various chapters investigate the transmission of other cultures, ideas and ideologies to the writer’s own cultural sphere and consider how the processes of cultural transfer interact with the forms and functions of travel writing.

This volume proposes a new and radically inclusive approach to the study of the book by using gender as a tool of analysis. While female authors and women in the book trades have long been studied, gender itself has yet to be explored as a methodology rather than a subject in book history. We argue that putting gender analysis into practice requires thinking inclusively about both the book world and the interactions of its participants from the beginning. With twenty-five pioneering case studies that stretch from colonial Peru to modern Delhi, using a variety of intersectional methodologies including network analysis, critical bibliography, and queer theory, Gender and the Book Trades sets out an innovative method of analysing the printed book. Contributors include: Rebecca Baumann, Montserrat Cachero, Verônica Calsoni Lima, Matthew Chambers, Kanupriya Dhingra, Nora Epstein, Natalia Fantetti, Jessica Farrell-Jobst, Agnes Gehbald, Rabia Gregory, Laura Guinot Ferri, Elizabeth Le Roux, Sarah Lubelski, Natalia Maillard Álvarez, Charley Matthews, Susan McElrath, Kirk Melnikoff, Malcolm Noble, Kate Ozment, Joanna Rozendaal, Kandice Sharren, Valentina Sonzini, Elise Watson, Joëlle Weis, Helen Williams, Alexandra E. Wingate, and Georgianna Ziegler.

Featuring cutting-edge essays by leading scholars, this collection formulates a new feminist theory of eighteenth-century women's satire.

The second issue of the yearbook History of Intellectual Culture (HIC) dedicates a thematic section to modes of publication. This volume addresses recent advances in publication studies and stresses the cultural formation of knowledge. By exploring and analyzing layers of presenting, sharing, and circulating knowledge, we invite readers to critically engage with questions of media uses and publishing practices and structures, both historically and in our contemporary digital age. The articles in this volume attest to the great variety of publication modes and perspectives, from the potential and limits of digitizing newspapers such as the New York Times to questions of positionality in building and using Wikipedia, from translation policies and female participation to the genre of university histories.

This book deals with changing conditions and conceptions of authorship in the long eighteenth century, a period said to have witnessed the birth of the modern author. Challenging claims about the public sphere and the professional writer, it engages with recent work on print culture and the history of the book and takes up such under-treated topics as the forms of literary careers and the persistence of the Renaissance “republic of letters” into the “age of authors.”

Imagined Networks in Pre-Modern Italian Literature: Literary Mothers, Literary Sisters presents the untold stories of the literary mothers and sisters in pre-modern Italian literature and the vibrant intellectual networks they forged. The authors argue that these women writers became adoptive references for other authors, often as an alternative to an established canon of textual authority. The proposed concepts of literary motherhood and sisterhood focus on the agency of the writers in choosing a model, rather than adhering to hierarchical structures. The women showcased in this book defied conventions, and are aware of the generative power of their works and regard themselves as literary guiding lights for future authors. They built prolific communities through exchanges, correspondences, debates, oblique conversations, and sometimes subtle allusions that confer authority to each other. The six essays in this book bring to life the figures of Caterina da Siena, Isabella Andreini, Giulia Bigolina, Margherita Costa, Lucrezia Marinella, Arcangela Tarabotti, and the relationship between Gaspara Stampa and Luisa Bergalli, as well as that between Bianca Milesi Mojon and Maria Edgeworth.

Gender, Mediation, and Popular Education in Venice, 1760–1830 examines how women with enough cultural capital could turn their identity as representatives of "the public" – those on the receiving end of education – to their advantage, producing knowledge under the guise of relaying it. Author Susan Dalton looks at the question of how elite women turned their reputation for ignorance into an opportunity to establish themselves as authors at the dawn of the nineteenth century in Venice. Many literary figures saw women as a group in need of education. By deploying essentialist understandings of femininity, whereby women possessed superior moral virtue but deficient rationality, these women entered the world of print as cultural mediators, identified by contemporaries as key players in the social projects of public education and moral edification central to the European Enlightenment. Focussing on Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi and Giustina Renier Michiel, both renowned Venetian authors, Dalton introduces two well-known Italian women of letters to English-speaking scholars, re-evaluates the impact of their writing in Italy and raises questions about female authorship across Europe, broadens our conceptions of gender norms, and enriches our knowledge of a little-known period of women’s writing in Italy. This volume is an essential resource for students and scholars alike interested in women’s and gender history, early modern history and social and cultural history.

Over the course of the long eighteenth century, a network of some fifty women writers, working in French, English, Dutch, and German, staked out a lasting position in the European literary field. These writers were multilingual and lived for many years outside of their countries of origin, translated and borrowed from each others' works, attended literary circles and salons, and fashioned a transnational women's literature characterized by highly recognizable codes. Drawing on a literary geography of national types, women writers across Western Europe read, translated, wrote, and rewrote stories about exceptional young women, literary heroines who transcend the gendered destiny of their distinctive cultural and national contexts. These transcultural heroines struggle against the cultural constraints determining the sexualized fates of local girls. In Heroines and Local Girls, Pamela L. Cheek explores the rise of women's writing as a distinct, transnational category in Britain and Europe between 1650 and 1810. Starting with an account of a remarkable tea party that brought together Frances Burney, Sophie von La Roche, and Marie Elisabeth de La Fite in conversation about Stéphanie de Genlis, she excavates a complex community of European and British women authors. In chapters that incorporate history, network theory, and feminist literary history, she examines the century-and-a-half literary lineage connecting Madame de Maintenon to Mary Wollstonecraft, including Charlotte Lennox and Françoise de Graffigny and their radical responses to sexual violence. Neither simply a reaction to, nor collusion with, patriarchal and national literary forms but, rather, both, women's writing offered an invitation to group membership through a literary project of self-transformation. In so doing, argues Cheek, women's writing was the first modern literary category to capitalize transnationally on the virtue of identity, anticipating the global literary marketplace's segmentation of affinity-based reading publics, and continuing to define women's writing to this day.