Selected Works of Eliza Haywood, Part I - Hardcover

Pettit, Alex

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1851965289 ISBN 13: 9781851965281

Publisher: Routledge, 2000

Synopsis

This text reprints selected non-fictional works by Haywood, with particular attention to the journalism, criticism, and "conduct and advice" material. Here, Haywood explicates and defends ideas on gender and culture that she develops obliquely elsewhere.

About this title

Review:

'This edition offers a wealth of information [and is] head and shoulders above other modern Haywood editions.' 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 'This splendid edition is cause for celebration' The Scriblerian

Synopsis:

Eliza Haywood (1693?-1756) was the most prolific female writer of the 18th century, author of more than 75 volumes of conduct and advice literature, criticism, journalism, fiction, drama, translations, literary history, fictionalized biography, psuedo-memoirs, and literary parody. Her enormous popularity in her own day is a matter of record: one scholar has demonstrated that her first novel "share(s) with "Gulliver's Travels" the distinction of being the most popular English fiction of the 18th century before "Pamela" (1741)". In our time, Haywood's interest in matters of gender and her lively, sometimes lurid, style have made her the subject of a rapidly expanding body of scholarship. According to the Modern Language Association's "International Bibliography of Language and Literature", more publications about Haywood have appeared in the last decade than had appeared in the preceding 25 years; more than a dozen have appeared in the last few years alone. "Suddenly", the well-known critic Paula Backscheider writes in a 1998 essay, "Haywood is everywhere". Backscheider is right to assert that "we need to ...engage (Haywood's) text as we have those of Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, and Samuel Richardson with the full arsenal of contemporary critical theory".

But one wonders how we might go about doing so, given the paucity of primary material available to us. If Haywood's critical stock is soaring, her bibliographical status remains depressingly earth-bound. This series reprints non-fictional works by Haywood, with particular attention to the journalism, criticism and "conduct and advice" material. This material is among Haywood's richest, both in terms of coverage and in terms of prose style. Here, Haywood explicates and defends the ideas about, for example, gender and culture that she develops obliquely elsewhere; here she establishes herself as an incisive commentator on 18th-century culture as well as a writer of sensationalistic fiction.

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1851965289
• ISBN 13: 9781851965281
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 1192