Women and Literature in Britain, 1700–1800

This collection of new essays brings together feminist critics, cultural historians and historians of publishing to provide a unique and up-to-date introduction to women's writing and its contexts in the eighteenth century. It was during this period that women began to contribute in significantly large numbers to a rapidly-expanding print culture. This volume documents the range and diversity of that contribution. It analyses the social, legal and ideological constructions of women which female writers had to negotiate, and it explores women's writing across a wide spectrum of genres - from fiction to broadside ballads, meditative poetry to confessional memoirs - as well as women's involvement as printers, sellers and purchasers of printed texts. An invaluable overview of women and literary culture in the period, Women and Literature in Britain, 1700-1800 is also an important contribution to our understanding of women's roles in the emergent public sphere of print.

Ros Ballaster is a Fellow in English Literature at Mansfield College, Oxford University. Clare Brant is a Lecturer at King's College London. Margaret Anne Doody is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Dianne Dugaw is a professor of English at the University of Oregon. Jan Fergus is a professor of English at Lehigh University. Isobel Grundy taught for many years at Queen Mary College, London University. Since 1990 she has been Henry Marshall Tory Professor at the University of Alberta, Canada. Harriet Guest is a senior lecturer in the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of York. Vivien Jones is a senior lecturer in the School of English, University of Leeds. Paula Mcdowell is associate professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. Felicity A. Nussabaum, Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. Ruth Perry is Professor of Literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Gillian Skinner was a Visiting Associate Professor at California State University, Hayward, and she is currently a Tutor and Scholar-in-Residence at St Chad's College, University of Durham. Angela J. Smallwood lectures in eighteenth-century English literature at the University of Nottingham and held a British Academy Research Readership 1991-93 in order to work on women playwrights. Kathryn Sutherland is Reader in Bibliography and Textual Criticism and Professorial Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford.