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In this challenging 1990 study, Donna Landry shows how an understanding of the remarkable but neglected careers of laboring-class women poets in the eighteenth century provokes a reassessment of our ideas concerning the literature of the period. Poets such as the washerwoman Mary Collier, the milkwoman Ann Yearsley, the domestic servants Mary Leapor and Elizabeth Hands, the dairywoman Janet Little, and the slave Phyllis Wheatley can be seen adapting the conventions of polite verse for the purposes of social criticism. Some of their strategies relate to earlier texts, revealing ideological blind spots in the tropes of male poets. Elsewhere, they made interesting innovations in poetic form. Mary Leapor's 'Crumble Hall', for instance, by attending to sexual politics, extends the critique of aristocratic privilege in the country-house poem beyond that of Pope and Crabbe. In Ann Yearsley's verse, landscape description, historical narrative, and philosophical meditation are infused with political comment. Historically important, technically impressive and often aesthetically innovative, the poetic achievements of these plebeian women writers constitute an exciting literary discovery.
This radical reinterpretation of Ottoman and Arab influences on horsemanship and breeding sheds new light on English national identity, as illustrated in such classic works as Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and George Stubbs's portrait of Whistlejacket.
Among the foremost feminist critics to have emerged to international eminence over the last fifteen years, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has relentlessly challenged the high ground of established theoretical discourse in literary and cultural studies. Although her rigorous reading of various authors has often rendered her work difficult terrain for those unfamiliar with poststructuralism, this collection makes significant strides in explicating Spivak's complicated theories of reading.
The present volume, number VIII in the series Groningen Studies in Cultural Change, offers a selection of papers presented at a workshop organised by Amanda Gilroy and Wil Verhoeven entitled Green and Pleasant Land: English Culture and the Romantic Countryside. The contributions in this volume illuminate the ideological investments of particular ways of experiencing the English countryside of the Romantic era. While their analyses of cultural change are historically specific, they explore, too, the conflicted present-day legacies of romantic landscapes.
Today's hunting debate began in the eighteenth century, when the idea of the countryside was being invented through the imaginative displacement of agricultural production in favour of country sports and landscape tourism. Between the Game Act of 1671 and its repeal in 1831, writers on walking and hunting often held opposed views, but contributed equally to the origins of modern ecology, while sharing a commitment to trespass that preserved common rights in an era of growing privatization.
This innovative collection of essays participates in the ongoing debate about the epistolary form, challenging readers to rethink the traditional association between the letter and the private sphere. It also pushes the boundaries of that debate by having the contributors respond to each other within the volume, thus creating a critical community between covers that replicates the dialogic nature of epistolarity itself, with all its dissonances and differences as well as its connections. Focusing mainly on Anglo-American texts from the seventeenth century to the present day, these nine essays and their "postscripts" engage the relationship between epistolary texts and discourses of gender, c...
As British women writers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries sought to define how they experienced their era's social and economic upheaval, they helped popularize a new style of bourgeois female sensibility. Building on her earlier work in Romantic Androgyny, Diane Long Hoeveler now examines the Gothic novels of Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, Charlotte Dacre Byrne, Mary Shelley, and the Brontës to show how these writers helped define femininity for women of the British middle class. Hoeveler argues that a female-created literary ideology, now known as "victim feminism," arose as the Gothic novel helped create a new social role of professional victim for wome...
The public and private spheres are conceived to be separate and complementary, useful in understanding human experience and social phenomena, gendered and perhaps "natural". Taking the usefulness of this model as a focus, these essays ask how the spheres interpenetrate.
A COMPANION TO THE GLOBAL RENAISSANCE An innovative collection of original essays providing an expansive picture of globalization across the early modern world, now in its second edition A Companion to the Global Renaissance: Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion, 1500–1700, Second Edition provides readers with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of both macro and micro perspectives on the commercial and cross-cultural interactions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Covering a uniquely broad range of literary and cultural materials, historical contexts, and geographical regions, the Companion’s varied chapters offer interdisciplinary perspectives on the implications...
This book looks critically at various constructions of the Indian citizen from 1991 to 2007, the period when economic liberalization became established government policy. Examining differing images of citizenship and its rules and rituals, Chowdhury sheds light on the complex interactions between culture and political economy in the New India.