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During the eighteenth century British critics believed that masculine values represented the best literature while feminine terms signified less important works or authors. Laura Runge argues that an understanding of the language of eighteenth-century criticism requires careful analysis of the gendered language of the era. Her exploration of why, for example, the heroic and the sublime were seen as masculine modes while the novel was viewed as a feminine genre addresses issues central to eighteenth-century studies that are still relevant today.
Aphra Behn (1640–1689), prolific and popular playwright, poet, novelist, translator, has a fascinating and extensive corpus of literature that plays a key role in literary history. Quantitative Literary Analysis of the Works of Aphra Behn: Words of Passion offers what no book has done to date, an analysis of all Behn’s literary output. It examines the author’s use of words in terms of frequencies and distributions and stacks the words in context to read Behn’s word usage synchronically. Using this experimental method, the book brings digital humanities into literary criticism, to enhance our understanding and appreciation of literature beyond what is possible in diachronic reading and scholarship less supported by digital means. The empirical approach works in collaboration with existing scholarship to understand Behn’s distinct language of love and extreme passions across her genres.
"Historicizes British women's relationships with other women through the medium of commemorative writing over the course of the long eighteenth century. Featuring archival discoveries, the contributions in this volume trace female networks, friendships, rivalries, and competition and uncover the material record of women's honor"--
Life After Death shows how representations of the widow in theeighteenth-century novel express attitudes toward emerging capitalismand women's participation in it. Authors responded to the century'sinstability by using widows, who had the right to act economically andself-interestedly, to teach women that virtue meant foregoing theopportunities that the changing economy offered. Novelists thus helpedto create expectations for women that linger today, and established thenovel as a cultural arbiter. The first study of widows in the developingnovel, Life After Death also takes the next step in merging genre, gender, and economic criticism
A literary and cultural history of the intimate space of the eighteenth-century closet—and how it fired the imaginations of Pepys, Sterne, Swift, and so many other writers Long before it was a hidden storage space or a metaphor for queer and trans shame, the closet was one of the most charged settings in English architecture. This private room provided seclusion for reading, writing, praying, dressing, and collecting—and for talking in select company. In their closets, kings and duchesses shared secrets with favorites, midwives and apothecaries dispensed remedies, and newly wealthy men and women expanded their social networks. In The Closet, Danielle Bobker presents a literary and cultur...
Contends that gender politics were influential in the early development of literary criticism and the writings of female critics
The Culture of Diagram is about visual thinking. Exploring a terrain where words meet pictures and formulas meet figures, the book foregrounds diagrams as tools for blurring those boundaries to focus on the production of knowledge as process. It outlines a history of convergence among diverse streams of data in real-time: from eighteenth-century print media and the diagrammatic procedures in the pages of Diderot's Encyclopedia to the paintings of Jacques-Louis David and mathematical devices that reveal the unseen worlds of quantum physics. Central to the story is the process of correlation, which invites observers to participate by eliciting leaps of imagination to fill gaps in data, equatio...
"Cultivated by hand" aligns the overlooked history of amateur musicians in the early years of the United States with little-understood practices of music book making. It reveals the pervasiveness of these practices, particularly among women, and their importance for the construction of gender, class, race, and nation.
By the time Ian Watt published The Rise of the Novel. in 1957, it was clear that many women novelists before Jane Austen had been overlooked in critical studies of literature and that some of them had been completely forgotten by the reading public. In this book, Brian Corman explores the question of how and why this came about. Corman provides a systematic survey of the reputations of early women novelists as canons of the novel developed over a period of roughly two hundred years, and, in so doing, suggests reasons for their frequent exclusion. Women Novelists before Jane Austen challenges the view that exclusion from the canon was a simple function of gender and goes deeper to examine pot...
The first examination of interconnected manuscript-exchanging coteries as an integral element of literary culture in eighteenth-century Britain. This title is also available as Open Access.