Inverting the Image of Swift’s “Triumfeminate”

Backscheider, Paula R.

doi:10.1353/jem.2004.0017

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…My own doctoral research (Keown, 2018) reveals that women's sociable verse (occasional poems, verse epistles, and so on) was often highly creative, and could even prove popular when it was printed: spontaneous verse composition was an aspirational accomplishment, and eighteenth-century readers were eager to access and imitate this writing. Our understanding of literary sociability has been enhanced through research into coteries which included women poets, such as the heterosocial circles surrounding Aaron Hill (Gerrard, 2003;Wilputte, 2014) and Jonathan Swift (Backscheider, 2004;Gerrard, 2016). For some women poets, supportive literary networks could become sources of anxiety, competition, and resentment, where the lines between friendship and patronage were frequently blurred (Andrews, 2013;Beutner, 2011;Ezell, 2013;Mills, 2009).…”

Section: Surveying Recent Scholarshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

Recent scholarship on eighteenth‐century women's poetry

Keown¹

2021

Literature Compass

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The eighteenth century was a period of vital importance for the development of women's poetry: with each passing decade, more women began to read and write verse in every available genre and form. Since the late 1980s, this poetry has become increasingly accessible, and individual women poets have been thoroughly integrated into academic research and teaching. This essay provides an overview of recent scholarship on eighteenth‐century women's poetry. It begins by outlining broad trends in women's literary history which have shaped the field, before highlighting the unique challenges that women's poetry presents. It then offers a more focused survey of recently published scholarship, with an emphasis on the last 2 decades. Emerging research themes span from the growth in book history and manuscript investigations, to the resurgence of formalist interpretation. Studies of women's poetry have allowed scholars not only to reassess women's contributions to eighteenth‐century literary history, but to reconsider the very nature of that history—by re‐envisioning how and why poetry was written, innovated, circulated, published, read, and valued within the period. The essay concludes by proposing future directions for the field, including the need for continued recovery work, more critical editions and monograph studies, new methodologies, cross‐period dialogues with scholars of early modern and Romantic women's poetry, and practical initiatives to support precarious early career researchers.

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Section: Surveying Recent Scholarshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

Recent scholarship on eighteenth‐century women's poetry

Keown¹

2021

Literature Compass

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“…The fullest study remains Barnett (), an account of Swift's circle of women. Backscheider () similarly recalibrates the prominence of women in Swift's circle by “inverting” the standard image of the Dean's attitude towards them. Tucker (), more than a decade earlier, had emphasised the role of one member in particular: Mary Barber.…”

Section: New Endings: the 1990s And Early 2000smentioning

confidence: 99%

Reading Swift's poetry, 1967–2017

Cook

2018

Literature Compass

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This essay surveys major scholarship on Jonathan Swift's poetry published after 1967, the 300th anniversary of his birth up to the 350th, in 2017. What is the current status of Swift as a poet, as distinct from Swift the prose satirist or even Swift the Hibernian Patriot? Is he best placed in separate Irish or English traditions or in both? Was he a mere man of rhymes or an ambitious poet? How have scholars approached his verse? Which works have received the most attention? Which deserve more?

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“…For a reading of the circle outside Swift's influence, see(Backscheider, 2004). Mary Barber's friendship with the Bluestocking Mary Pendarves, who married Patrick Delany in 1743, predated her friendship with Swift by at least 13 years.…”

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confidence: 99%

What the Women of Dublin Did with John Locke

Gerrard

2020

Roy. Inst. Philos. Suppl.

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William Molyneux's friendship with John Locke helped make Locke's ideas well known in early eighteenth-century Dublin. The Essay Concerning Human Understanding was placed on the curriculum of Trinity College in 1692, soon after its publication. Yet there has been very little discussion of whether Irish women from this period read or knew Locke's work, or engaged more generally in contemporary philosophical debate. This essay focuses on the work of Laetitia Pilkington (1709–1750) and Mary Barber (1685–1755), two of the Dublin women writers of the so-called ‘Triumfeminate’, a literary and intellectual circle connected to Jonathan Swift which met and discussed ideas at the home of Patrick Delaney. Pilkington and Barber were particularly influenced by Locke's ideas on obstetrics and childhood in his Some Thoughts Concerning Education and especially by his discussion of memory in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Both authors engage playfully and imaginatively with Locke's theories, especially in a domestic context. Not all philosophical debates took place in the public male spaces of school, coffee house and university. This essay attempts to recreate the contexts in which intellectually curious women of the ‘middling sort’ encountered and engaged with philosophical ideas, especially those of Locke, and how these shaped their writing.

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Inverting the Image of Swift’s “Triumfeminate”

Cited by 5 publications

References 20 publications

Recent scholarship on eighteenth‐century women's poetry

Recent scholarship on eighteenth‐century women's poetry

Reading Swift's poetry, 1967–2017

What the Women of Dublin Did with John Locke

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