Revising Women: Eighteenth-Century "Women's Fiction" and Social Engagement - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801862361 ISBN 13: 9780801862366

Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999

Synopsis

Revising Women is a collection of essays by a distinguished group of feminist critics. Each essay is a contribution to the history of the English novel, to our understanding of literature's place in cultural debate, and to women's studies. The essays give steady attention to the ways novels participate in social processes and the ways women perceived the public sphere and stubbornly attempted to participate in it. Rich contextualization and adept use of theory reveal both the individual writer's story and the story beneath the text that is a cultural production with the potential to reveal why we and our society are as we are. Each essay develops ways of using history in relation to literature, takes up large historical events and issues, and interprets in fine detail what individuals do with them. Beginning with the fictions of the late seventeenth century, and ending with Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen, the essays in Revising Women are characterized by informed historicizing, detailed textual explication, sophisticated feminist theory, and dedicated attention to the interrelationships between life and literary works and between everyday existence and political processes.

About this title

Review:

"In her preface, Backscheider makes high claims for this collection as the fruit of several lifetimes' feminist rereading of 18th-century fiction. These claims turn out to be justified by a truly extraordinary book." -- Choice

"These are valuable essays. Those who are interested in eighteenth-century English women, whether or not they are literary scholars, will find much to interest and stimulate them in this book." -- Barbara Brandon Schnorrenberg, Albion

"Written to illustrate the maturity of a discipline, the essays in Revising Women demonstrate that women writers used fiction to participate in debates taking place in the public sphere." -- Nora Nachumi, JASNA News

"The project that has engaged Paula Backscheider, one of the most prolific and prominent scholars in the field of eighteenth-century studies, is one that I believe is both heroic and potentially enduring: to reconcile the sort of thick description she favors -- historical-biographical narratives that take full advantage of extant archive material and reveal richly detailed portraits of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British culture -- with the lessons learned and opportunities afforded by recent literary theory." -- Richard C. Taylor, NWSA Journal

"These essays reinforce the need to reevaluate female authorship of the eighteenth century." -- Rikki Noel-Williams, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature

Synopsis:

"Those of us who joined together to produce this book represent over seventy-five years of feminist scholarship. We have seen and participated in one of the most important changes in the history of literary study ...There is a special joy in writing essays like these--essays that bring an entire career's worth of learning and thinking to bear on women, literature, and society."--from the Preface, by Paula R. Backscheider Revising Women is a collection of essays by a distinguished group of feminist critics. Each essay is a contribution to the history of the English novel and demonstrates the reactivation of texts, a kind of criticism that produces rich contextualization in order to reveal the story beneath--not only of the individual writer but also of a text that is a cultural production with the potential to reveal why we and our society are as we are. Each essay develops ways of using history in relation to literature, takes up large historical events and issues, and interprets in fine detail what individuals do with them.

The essays are characterized by informed historicizing, detailed textual explication, sophisticated feminist theory, and dedicated attention to the interrelationships between life and works and between everyday existence and political processes. The essays bring together a number of things often discussed separately or even opposed to one another. Among these are attention to the constructing power of sociohistorical forces and the individual creating writer and the works of male and female authors. The essays span more that 100 years, beginning with the fictions of the late seventeenth century and ending with Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen.

About this edition

• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0801862361
• ISBN 13: 9780801862366
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288
• Editor: Backscheider Professor Paula R.