This pathbreaking collection features original essays by leading scholars working at the intersections of women’s literary history, book history, and media cultures. Drawing on underexplored archives and innovative methodologies—from feminist bibliography to digital humanities—the contributors generate new narratives about the long eighteenth century and the centrality of gender to its literary production. Moving beyond a narrow focus on authorship, the chapters recover women as writers and readers, editors and curators, printers and book owners, scholars, preachers, and political actors. Across print, manuscript, and oral cultures, they illuminate the collaborative networks and material conditions shaping cultural production and circulation. Organized into sections on print histories, manuscript cultures, and new methodological approaches, this collection reshapes eighteenth-century studies while modeling ethically engaged archival research. Accessible and wide-ranging, it will appeal to scholars and students in literary studies, women’s and gender studies, and book history alike.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Introduction: Gender, Literary Networks, and Media Cultures in the Eighteenth Century
Leith Davis, Michelle Levy, and Diana Solomon
Part I: Print Histories
Chapter 1: The Printer’s Mark: Finding Anne Maxwell and London Printers’ Networks
Margaret J.M. Ezell
Chapter 2: Complicating Narratives of National Superiority: The Lady’s Magazine; or Polite Companion (1759–1767)
Susan Carlile
Chapter 3: What Periodicals Do To (And For) Literary History: Lessons from the Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832)
Jennie Batchelor
Chapter 4: The Waldie Sisters and their Publishers: Building a Literary Career in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain
Pam Perkins
Chapter 5: Annotated Catalogs and Remote Participation: Restoring Women to the Auction
Bénédicte Miyamoto
Part II: Manuscript Cultures
Chapter 6: Sociability, Collaboration, Collecting: A Case Study (Harrowby Manuscript 81)
Isobel Grundy
Chapter 7: The Domestic Economy of a Poem Book
Alexis Chema
Chapter 8: “Scratch it out”: Retrospective Editing in the Manuscript Verse Miscellany
Angela Wachowich
Chapter 9: Mary Tooth and Methodist Women’s Manuscript Sermons
Andrew O. Winckles
Chapter 10: “Fugitive Sightings”: Making Women Visible in “The Lyon in Mourning” Manuscript Project
Leith Davis
Part III: Rethinking Women’s Book History
Chapter 11: Making Meaning Through Gender, Materiality, and Ownership: “A Catalogue of a Young Country Ladies [sic] Library” (1712)
Melanie Bigold
Chapter 12: Female Readers at the Bristol Library Society, 1772–1800
Norbert Schürer
Chapter 13: Women Readers in the British Museum
Michelle Levy
Chapter 14: Canada’s First Women Writers
Carole Gerson
Chapter 15: Ethics of Care in the Ballitore Project
Rachael Scarborough King, Shaun Nowicki, Jana Ross, Tomas Gonzalez, Audrey Rodriguez, and Yvette de la Vega
Chapter 16: A Modern Dialogue of the Dead
Elizabeth Eger
Afterword: More Modern Dialoguing with the Dead
Betty A. Schellenberg
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index
LEITH DAVIS is a professor of English and director of the Research Centre for Scottish Studies at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. She is author of Mediating Cultural Memory in Britain and Ireland: From the 1688 Revolution to the 1745 Jacobite Risingand the author or coeditor of seven other books.
MICHELLE LEVY is professor of English at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. Her most recent books are Literary Manuscript Culture in Romantic Britain and, with Betty Schellenberg, How and Why to Do Things with Eighteenth-Century Manuscripts.
DIANA SOLOMON is an associate professor of English at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. She is the author of Prologues and Epilogues of Restoration Theater: Gender and Comedy, Performance and Print and coeditor of The Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama.
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