Women of Letters, Manuscript Circulation, and Print Afterlives in the Eighteenth Century

Bigold, Melanie

doi:10.1057/9781137033574

Cited by 15 publications

(9 citation statements)

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“…Other women poets deliberately chose to eschew print in favour of sociable manuscript production. Whelan's (2011Whelan's ( , 2015 research into nonconformist women's poetry-alongside broader literary studies by Bigold (2013), Schellenberg (2016) and Williams (2017)-demonstrates that many women writers (and their male friends) habitually composed manuscript verse for artistic experimentation, personal fulfilment, and to entertain and expand their social networks. Informative models for locating and interpreting women's manuscript poetry have emerged (e.g., Londry, 2004a;Runge, 2006), which convey just how much archival material remains unstudied, whilst highlighting that women's poetic activities extended beyond authorship to include acts of 'collecting, selecting, transcribing, editing, juxtaposing, endorsing and exchanging poems' (Hackett, 2013, p. 131).…”

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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“…Exploration of these questions in cases of educated women has produced strong insights into the collaborative and heterosocial practices of elite literary production. 11 Highlighting religious identity, scholarship that charts and analyses the intellectual culture of seventeenth-century Puritan women has emphasised 'the cultural authority and extensive social and intellectual networks' of the highly literate, mostly elite, women featured there. 12 But scholarly attention to the literary practices of women associated with orthodox religious nonconformity fades for the period beyond Toleration.…”

Section: Memory Places Ministers and Nonconformist Memorialsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Memory, Community and Textuality in Nonconformist Life‐Writings, 1760‐1810

Whitehouse¹

2018

J Eighteenth Century Stud

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This article asks why memorial writing was so important for religious Dissenters in the eighteenth century, and what the role of women was in the production of nonconformist culture, by investigating the material circumstances of production, preservation and dissemination of life-writings. It introduces the editorial and commemorative activities of Mercy Doddridge and Jane Attwater, asks how a writer's confessional identity might find its way into the structure and content of her writing and compares processes of composition for printed texts with the compilation and preservation of manuscript records.

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“…Bigold has recognised the urgency of approaching the period from a more holistic point of view, since for the most part, "scholars have been content to assess a writer's engagement and importance based on their productions in print". 44 The need to recognise that "there were forms of social authorship wider than the print market",45 which reveals the degree of involvement of women as writers who generate knowledge through life-writing (and writing for life) in the form of poetry, letters or miscellaneous genres of prose and fiction.…”

Section: Marketing Talentmentioning

confidence: 99%