Revolutionary Imaginings in the 1790s

Garnai, Amy

doi:10.1057/9780230250710

Cited by 74 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Although this writing was sometimes circulated within like-minded manuscript communities, there were many women who printed polemic, public-facing poetry. Studies have clustered around two eras: the early eighteenth century, during the rage of party, the persistence of Jacobitism, and the rise in proto-feminist discourse (Barash, 1996;Mills, 2000;Prescott, 2005a;Pickard, 2006); and the end of the century, amidst the climate of radicalism and revolution (Clery, 2017;Craciun, 2002;Garnai, 2009;Keane, 2013;Mellor, 2000). Although some women utilised similar strategies for discussing public issues-for example, framing their writing as an intervention from a concerned wife, mother, or daughter-the breadth of critical work on this poetry demonstrates that women adopted extremely diverse poetic techniques to express their opinions and allegiances.…”

Section: Surveying Recent Scholarshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

Recent scholarship on eighteenth‐century women's poetry

Keown¹

2021

Literature Compass

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract