Revising Women
Eighteenth-Century "Women's Fiction" and Social Engagement
Paula R. Backscheider(Editor)
Johns Hopkins University Press
Published on 10. March 2000
Book
Hardback
288 pages
978-0-8018-6236-6 (ISBN)
Description
"Those of us who joined together to produce this book represent over seventy-five years of feminist scholarship. We have seen and participated in one of the most important changes in the history of literary study ...There is a special joy in writing essays like these--essays that bring an entire career's worth of learning and thinking to bear on women, literature, and society."--from the Preface, by Paula R. Backscheider Revising Women is a collection of essays by a distinguished group of feminist critics. Each essay is a contribution to the history of the English novel and demonstrates the reactivation of texts, a kind of criticism that produces rich contextualization in order to reveal the story beneath--not only of the individual writer but also of a text that is a cultural production with the potential to reveal why we and our society are as we are. Each essay develops ways of using history in relation to literature, takes up large historical events and issues, and interprets in fine detail what individuals do with them.
The essays are characterized by informed historicizing, detailed textual explication, sophisticated feminist theory, and dedicated attention to the interrelationships between life and works and between everyday existence and political processes. The essays bring together a number of things often discussed separately or even opposed to one another. Among these are attention to the constructing power of sociohistorical forces and the individual creating writer and the works of male and female authors. The essays span more that 100 years, beginning with the fictions of the late seventeenth century and ending with Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen.
The essays are characterized by informed historicizing, detailed textual explication, sophisticated feminist theory, and dedicated attention to the interrelationships between life and works and between everyday existence and political processes. The essays bring together a number of things often discussed separately or even opposed to one another. Among these are attention to the constructing power of sociohistorical forces and the individual creating writer and the works of male and female authors. The essays span more that 100 years, beginning with the fictions of the late seventeenth century and ending with Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen.
Reviews / Votes
"In her preface, Backscheider makes high claims for this collection as the fruit of several lifetimes' feminist rereading of 18th-century fiction. These claims turn out to be justified by a truly extraordinary book."--Choice "This well-conceived and exciting book brings together experts in feminist theory, all of whom utilize with sophistication the skills of historical research, biographical interpretation (including post-modern issues of the construction of the self), and cultural studies. Their names alone insure a volume well worth reading, and these essays represent the writers at their best. Their methodology often represents advances in the application and understanding of feminist theory, and is of interest to all who follow developments in that field."--Patricia Craddock, University of Florida "Each of the contributors to this superior volume is an accomplished, prolific scholar, widely recognized and highly regarded in the field. The essays, all exceedingly well-written, are longer, more ambitious, and more substantial than the norm for this type of book--a departure that I welcome and suspect that many other readers will as well. This is a book that should be widely read and discussed by scholars of the novel, of eighteenth-century culture generally, and of the history and theory of gender."--Joseph Bartolomeo, University of MassachusettsMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Baltimore, MD
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
5 s/w Zeichnungen
5 Line drawings, black and white
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 22 mm
Weight
544 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8018-6236-6 (9780801862366)
DOI
10.56021/9780801862366
Copyright in bibliographic data is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or its licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
12/2002
Johns Hopkins University Press
€23.99
Available for download

Book
10/2002
Johns Hopkins University Press
€34.00
Article not available for order
Person
Paula R. Backscheider is West Point Pepperell-Philpott Eminent Scholar in the Department of English at Auburn University. Her books include Daniel Defoe: His Life and Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England, both available from Johns Hopkins.
Content
Chapter 1. The Novel's Gendered Space
Chapter 2. The Rise of Gender as Political Category
Chapter 3. Renegotiating the Gothic
Chapter 4. My Art Belongs to Daddy? Thomas Day, Maria Edgeworth, and the Pre-Texts of Belinda: Women Writers and Patriachal Authority
Chapter 5. Jane Austen and the Culture of Circulating Libraries: The Construction of Female Literacy
Chapter 2. The Rise of Gender as Political Category
Chapter 3. Renegotiating the Gothic
Chapter 4. My Art Belongs to Daddy? Thomas Day, Maria Edgeworth, and the Pre-Texts of Belinda: Women Writers and Patriachal Authority
Chapter 5. Jane Austen and the Culture of Circulating Libraries: The Construction of Female Literacy