In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the 'woman writer' emerged as a category of authorship in England. Publishing the Woman Writer in England, 1670-1750 seeks to uncover how exactly this happened and the ways publishers tried to market a new kind of author to the public. Based on a survey of nearly seven hundred works with female authors from this period, this book contends that authorship was constructed, not always by the author, for market appeal, that biography often supported an authorial persona rooted in the genre of the work, and that authorship was a role rather than an identity. Through an emphasis on paratexts, including prefaces, title pages, portraits, and biographical notes, Leah Orr analyses the representation of women writers in this period of intense change to make two related arguments. First, women writers were represented in a variety of ways as publishers sought successful models for a new kind of writer in print. Second, a new approach is needed for studying early women writers and others who occupy gaps in the historical record. This book shows that a study of the material contexts of printed books is one way to work with the evidence that survives. It therefore begins with a very familiar kind of author-centric literary history and deconstructs it to conclude with a reception-centered history that takes a more encompassing view of authorship. In addition to analysis of many little-known and anonymous authors, case studies include Aphra Behn, Catharine Trotter/Cockburn, Laetitia Pilkington, Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy, and Anne Dacier.

Thorne confronts the history and enduring legacy of anti-foundationalist thought. At its heart, this book is a plea not to take doubt at its word—a plea for the return of a vanished philosophical intelligence and for the retirement of an anti-Enlightenment thinking that commits the very crimes that it lays at Enlightenment’s door.

Rethinking the history of women's writing and literary history itself, this volume 2 examines the diversity of early women's writing (from verse and songs to household records and recipes), offering a new paradigm for understanding women's shaping roles in the literary, religious, and political movements of the sixteenth century.

A world list of books in the English language.

This volume is a survey of writing by women from the Middle Ages to the late 1990's. It comprises nine essays by women scholars who are experts in a particular period of literary history and who have an interest in feminist criticism. The book also establishes characteristics belonging to each period, and also suggests ways in which continuities and developments have emerged. Although this text is informed by feminist criticism, it is also designed to be accessible to readers unacquainted with feminist literary theory and caters to both a general and an undergraduate readership.

Emilie Du Châtelet was an accomplished scientific and philosophical writer whose contribution to French intellectual life in the first half of the 18th century has long been obscured by her association with Voltaire. This volume of her writings will help re-establish a reputation that has long been overshadowed.

Passage of the first copyright law in 1710 marked a radical change in the perception of authorship. According to Laura J. Rosenthal, the new construction of the author as the owner of literary property bore different consequences for women than for men, for amateurs than for professionals, and for playwrights than for other authors. Rosenthal explores distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate forms of literary appropriation in drama from 1650 to 1730. In considering the alleged plagiarists Margaret Cavendish (the Duchess of Newcastle), Aphra Behn, John Dryden, Colley Cibber, and Susanna Centlivre, Rosenthal maintains that accusations had less to do with the degree of repetition in texts than with the gender of the authors and the cultural location of the plays. Questions of literary property, then, became not just legal matters but part of a discourse aimed at conferring or withholding cultural authority. Struggles over literary property must be seen in the context of competing conceptions of property in general, Rosenthal asserts, and she shows how both Filmerian and Lockean models gender the position of the owner. Drawing on feminist theory and from scholarship in history, philosophy, and political science, Rosenthal debates the relationship between women and property in modern England. Gender and class, she contends, continue to influence judgments as to what stories a playwright can own or use, as to whom critics praise as heirs to Shakespeare and Jonson, and as to whom they damn as plagiarists.

Family Authorship and Romantic Print Culture explores the conjunction of authorship and family life as a distinctive cultural formation of Romantic-era Britain. Through examination of the practices and texts of literary families, the book traces an alternative history of Romantic authorship, one that lies on the cusp between a vanishing manuscript culture and the dominance of print; that reflects a struggle in Romantic self-identity between communities of feeling and individual genius; and that grapples with an evolving tension between the private and public spheres.