Sarah Prescott discusses the careers of a number of key women writers of the period from 1690 to 1740, exploring the role played by geographical location, literary circles, patronage, the literary marketplace, and subscription publication in shaping patterns of female authorship. The volume also provides a wealth of detail about the circumstances which affected the careers of individual women as well as investigating the marketing, reception, and self-representation of women writers in general.

Ancient Models in the Early Modern Republican Imagination, edited by Wyger Velema and Arthur Weststeijn, approaches the early modern republican political imagination from a fresh perspective. While most scholars agree on the importance of the classical world to early modern republican theorists, its role is all too often described in rather abstract and general terms such as “classical republicanism” or the “neo-roman theory of free states”. The contributions to this volume propose a different approach and all focus on the specific ways in which ancient republics such as Rome, Athens, Sparta, and the Hebrew Republic served as models for early modern republican thought. The result is a novel interpretation of the impact of antiquity on early modern republicanism.

The ladies dictionary, being a general entertainment for the fair-sex was published on 19 March 1694 by John Dunton. No compiler was named on the title page, but the dedication by 'the author' addressed 'to the Ladies, Gentlewomen, and Others, of the Fair-Sex' was signed 'N. H.' The book offers around 1950 lexical and encyclopaedic entries, the great majority excerpted either verbatim or with some degree of abridgement or adaptation from other published books. It was the first substantial reference book to be published in England with women as its principal target audience, and was arguably the first alphabetically-arranged encyclopaedia to be published in English. The editor's introduction in this edition starts with an overview of the publisher John Dunton, and goes on to discuss the compilers of LD; its sources; its editing, printing and proof-reading; and its advertising, publication and afterlife. It concludes with lists of primary and secondary sources (including all the identified sources of LD). The reproduction of the dictionary that follows is from the Robert H. Taylor collection at Princeton. Because LD is irregularly alphabetized, the reproduction is followed by a new index of entries in strict alphabetical order, with their sources identified.

This collection explores for the first time the importance of secret history in the literature of the long eighteenth century.

Inquiring into the formation of a literary canon during the Restoration and the eighteenth century, Barbara Benedict poses the question, "Do anthologies reflect or shape contemporary literary taste?" She finds that there was a cultural dialectic at work: miscellanies and anthologies transmitted particular tastes while in turn being influenced by the larger culture they helped to create. Benedict reveals how anthologies of the time often created a consensus of literary and aesthetic values by providing a bridge between the tastes of authors, editors, printers, booksellers, and readers. Making the Modern Reader, the first full treatment of the early modern anthology, is in part a history of the London printing trade as well as of the professionalization of criticism. Benedict thoroughly documents the historical redefinition of the reader: once a member of a communal literary culture, the reader became private and introspective, morally and culturally shaped by choices in reading. She argues that eighteenth-century collections promised the reader that culture could be acquired through the absorption of literary values. This process of cultural education appealed to a middle class seeking to become discriminating consumers of art. By addressing this neglected genre, Benedict contributes a new perspective on the tension between popular and high culture, between the common reader and the elite. This book will interest scholars working in cultural studies and those studying noncanonical texts as well as eighteenth-century literature in general. Originally published in 1996. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Simultaneously challenging conventional male-dominated thought and revisionist modern feminism, this book argues that gendered identities can best be conceived relationally, and thus that a fuller understanding of gender roles in the eighteenth century (and by extension in our own) must include an analysis of men’s place in the discourse of domesticity. Examining the phenomenal rise of the social periodical at the end of the seventeenth century, the author theorizes the genre’s crucial contribution to the construction of a class-specific gender identity that succeeds as ideology not, as usually assumed, by separating the feminine private sphere from the masculine public one, but by delineating the private as an important locus of masculine control. Marshalling social history, political theory, economics, and sociology in an attempt to account historically for the appearance of the sentimental family—controlled by the man who is at once lover and husband, father and brother—this book forcefully questions the validity of the doctrine of separate spheres and the ascription of gender roles connected to it. The social periodical provides compelling evidence for understanding the relationship between gender construction and class values. By focusing on such topics as courtship, marriage, and parent-child relations, the genre configured the nuclear family as a locus where emotional and sexual gratification supported material gain. Periodical literature offered an ostensibly neutral forum for public debate about private issues where male editors, by instructing and reforming women, also learned to become the chaste husbands and watchful fathers of the bourgeois home. In the process of demonstrating how social periodicals constructed new forms of masculine control still very much with us today, the book also shows how, by galvanizing an important new reading class, they contributed to the rise of the novel. Periodical literature exerted a transformative effect on English society by displaying a moral and cultural authority, not to mention a readership, that novels would struggle for many decades to achieve.

This book provides an expansive view of celebrity’s intimate dimensions. In the process, it offers a timely reassessment of how notions of private and public were negotiated by writers, readers, actors and audiences in the early to mid-eighteenth century. The essays assembled here explore the lives of a wide range of figures: actors and actresses, but also politicians, churchmen, authors and rogues; some who courted celebrity openly and others who seemed to achieve it almost inadvertently. At a time when the topic of celebrity’s origins is attracting unprecedented scholarly attention, this collection is an important, pioneering resource.

This book examines the writing and manuscript publication of key authors from 1550 to 1800.