Bluestocking Studies 2011–2017: The Transnational Turn

Abstract

As international trade, exploration, and communication proliferated in the 18th and early 19th centuries, a significant group of British intellectual women, the Bluestockings, came to recognize themselves as part of a transnational network. They were attentive especially to intellectual pursuits, women's cultural, sociopolitical, and economic interests, and various forms of social progress, and some of these preoccupations developed over the period and fed into first‐wave feminist programs later in the 19th century. I consider the extensive Bluestocking scholarship concentrating on transnationalism as well as recent research that has incorporated international themes. The field of bluestocking studies at this juncture forcefully extends the feminist recovery project and, because of its international interest, might help to counter nationalist and anti‐feminist pressures currently challenging the academy.

Women and the book in Britain's long eighteenth century

“…The British salon is explored in Susan Schmid's (2013) British Literary Salons of the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries , which examines how the salon carried forward Bluestocking traditions. Although the scholarship on Bluestocking culture (including orality) is too vast to address in this essay, I recommend Debora Heller's (2011) and Alessa John's (2017) review essays in Literature Compass , as well as Schellenberg (2010) and Elizabeth Eger's (2010) study grappling with the “breadth and diversity of cultural work” (p. 5) by women, in correspondence, conversation and print, Bluestockings: Women of Reason from Enlightenment to Romanticism . Expanding consideration of the flourishing of female writers and female‐led salons outside of Britain to Scotland and Ireland, are Pam Perkins' (2010) Women Writers of the Edinburgh Enlightenment and Amy Prendergast's (2015) Literary Salons Across Britain and Ireland in the Long Eighteenth Century .…”