British Women Writers And The French Revolution

Examines the full spectrum of women's participation in the social, economic, religious, and poetic debates surrounding the French Revolution.

British Women Writers and the French Revolution provides an overview of a wide range of British women's writings on the French Revolution, from writers sympathetic to the Revolution like Mary Robinson, Helen Maria Williams, and Charlotte Smith, to anti-revolutionary writers like Hannah More and Jane West. Based on new research in French and British archives and libraries, the book uncovers little-known writings by British women, and argues that these writers developed a distinct antinationalism, in some cases even a feminist cosmopolitanism, in their responses to the European revolutionary crisis.

Drawing on three decades of feminist scholarship bent on rediscovering lost and abandoned women writers, Susan Staves provides a comprehensive history of women's writing in Britain from the Restoration to the French Revolution. This major work of criticism also offers fresh insights about women's writing in all literary forms, not only fiction, but also poetry, drama, memoir, autobiography, biography, history, essay, translation and the familiar letter. Authors celebrated in their own time and who have been neglected, and those who have been revalued and studied, are given equal attention. The book's organisation by chronology and its attention to history challenge the way we periodise literary history. Each chapter includes a list of key works written in the period covered, as well as a narrative and critical assessment of the works. This magisterial work includes a comprehensive bibliography and list of prevalent editions of the authors discussed.

This book is a major reassessment of the French Revolution's impact on the English novel of the Romantic period. Focusing particularly - but by no means exclusively - on women writers of the time, it explores the enthusiasm, wariness, or hostility with which the Revolution was interpreted and represented for then-contemporary readers. A team of international scholars study how English Romantic novelists sought to guide the British response to an event that seemed likely to turn the world upside down.

Essays originally generated by the academic conferences and events organized throughout Britain in 1989 to mark the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution investigate the British literary responses to the monumental upheaval, and examine as well certain critical problems regarding the relationship between texts, history, and theory. Distributed by Taylor and Francis. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This extensive collection of English-language essays examines the many strategies of resistance to male domination that women in France from the 16th through the 18th centuries utilized in their lives and their writings.

Brings together British women writers who opposed what they figured as the poison of revolutionary thought, and who used the novel form in their search for a vehicle to carry a counterrevolutionary antidote. Reading Jane West, Hannah More, Elizabeth Hamilton, Mary Brunton, Laetitia Matilda Hawkins, and Jane Porter in relation to each other and to their antirevolutionary contemporaries, this study shows that they developed an alternative feminine (but not feminist) discourse within the broader context of conservative print culture.

Duggan, and Adrion Dula hope both to foreground women writers' important contributions to the genre and to challenge common assumptions about what a fairy tale is for scholars, students, and general readers.