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Reflections on Biography is intended for all readers of biography--lifelong or occasional, critical or casual--and is written by an award-winning biographer, Paula R. Backscheider. The author examines biography from many angles and gives a tour of the decisions biographers make and some of the implications of those choices. Its aim is to increase the pleasure of reading biographies, to add new, enjoyable dimensions even as it increases readers' insights into the art of writing them. The book concludes with observations about the form's future directions and challenges. In this second edition, Backscheider provides a new Introduction that describes innovative forms of biography and new theoretical directions.
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In this book, Paula Backscheider considers Daniel Defoe's entire canon as related, developing, and in close dynamic relationship to the literature of its time. In so doing, she revises our conception of the contexts of Defoe's work and reassesses his achievement and contribution as a writer. By restoring a literary context for modern criticism, Backscheider argues the intensity and integrity of Defoe's artistic ambitions, demonstrating that everything he wrote rests solidly upon extensive reading of books published in England, his understanding of the reading tastes of his contemporaries, and his engagement with the issues and events of his time. Defoe, the dedicated professional writer and ...
“Our sense of eighteenth-century poetic territory is immeasurably expanded by [this] excellent historical and cultural” study of UK women poets of the era (Cynthia Wall, Studies in English Literature). This major work offers a broad view of the writing and careers of eighteenth-century women poets, casting new light on the ways in which poetry was read and enjoyed, on changing poetic tastes in British culture, and on the development of many major poetic genres and traditions. Rather than presenting a chronological survey, Paula R. Backscheider explores the forms in which women wrote and the uses to which they put those forms. Considering more than forty women in relation to canonical mal...
A collection of essays from feminist critics, each of which explores the history of the English novel, literature's place in cultural debate and women's studies. They begin with the fictions of the late 17th century and end with Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen.
Elizabeth Singer Rowe played a pivotal role in the development of the novel during the eighteenth century.Winner of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of the Choice ACRLElizabeth Singer Rowe and the Development of the English Novel is the first in-depth study of Rowe's prose fiction. A four-volume collection of her work was a bestseller for a hundred years after its publication, but today Rowe is a largely unrecognized figure in the history of the novel. Although her poetry was appreciated by poets such as Alexander Pope for its metrical craftsmanship, beauty, and imagery, by the time of her death in 1737 she was better known for her fiction. According to Paula R. Backscheider, Rowe's maj...
Though strikingly varied in narrative format and purpose, ranging as they do from the erotic and sensational to the sentimental and pious, they offer a distinct fictional approach to the moral and social issues of the age from a female standpoint.
New Contexts for Eighteenth-Century British Fiction is a collection of thirteen essays honoring Professor Jerry C. Beasley, who retired from the University of Delaware in 2005. The essays, written by friends, collaborators and former students, reflect the scholarly interests that defined Professor Beasley's career and point to new directions of critical inquiry. The initial essays, which discuss Tobias Smollett, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, and Samuel Richardson, suggest new directions in biographical writing, including the intriguing discourse of 'life writing' explored by Paula Backscheider. Subsequent essays enrich understandings of eighteenth-century fiction by examining lesser-known works by Jane Barker, Eliza Haywood, and Charlotte Lennox. Many of the essays, especially those that focus on Smollett, use political pamphlets, material artifacts, and urban legends to place familiar novels in new contexts. The collection's final essay demonstrates the vital importance of bibliographic study.
In the first reconstruction of the London street pageants staged from 1659 to 1662, she describes how Charles II used theatrical events to reimpose the concept of a Stuart monarchy - and how his opponents responded with rival entertainments advocating a different idea of the monarchy and the future. She then examines the London theatrical season of 1695-96, when one third of the new plays performed were written by women. Here Backscheider shows how transgressive, revisionary literature can awaken censoring and collaborative forces even as it opens debate.
This anthology gathers 368 poems by 80 British women poets of the long eighteenth century. Few of these poems have been reprinted since originally published, and all are crucial to understanding fully the literary history of women writers. Paula R. Backscheider and Catherine E. Ingrassia demonstrate the enormous diversity of poetry produced during this time by organizing the poems in three broad and deliberately overlapping categories: by genre, establishing that women wrote in all of the forms that men did with equal mastery and creativity; by theme, offering a revisionary look at the range of topics these writers addressed, including war, ecology, friendship, religion, and the stages of li...