British Women Satirists in the Long Eighteenth Century
British Women Satirists in the Long Eighteenth Century
Elizabeth Tasker Davis, Stephen F. Austin State University, Texas
This collection of innovative essays by leading scholars on eighteenth-century British women satirists showcases women's contributions to the satiric tradition and challenges the assumption that women were largely targets, rather than practitioners, of satire during the long eighteenth century. The essays examine women's satires across diverse genres, from the fable to the periodical, and attend to women writers' appropriation of a literary style and form often viewed as exclusively masculine. The introduction features a new theory of women's satire and proposes a framework for analyzing satiric techniques employed by women writers. Organized chronologically, the contributors' essays address a wide range of authors and explore the ways in which satiric writings by women engaged in contemporary cultural conversations, influencing assumptions about gender, sociability, politics, and literary practices. This inclusive yet tightly-focused collection formulates an innovative and provocative new feminist theory of satire.
- Sheds light on an underexplored area of eighteenth-century studies, providing exciting new information and valuable new resources on women writers' innovations in the satiric mode including a list of over 50 eighteenth-century British women satirists and a stimulating guide to further reading
- Showcases the unique contributions of women from a wide array of backgrounds to the literary tradition of British satire, offering a new feminist theoretical framework for analyzing and understanding the genre
- Takes an accessible yet thorough interdisciplinary approach spanning archival, genre, historicist, and rhetorical analyses and paying close attention to satiric ventriloquism, gendering, and protofeminist inventions
Reviews & endorsements
‘This book, thanks to the intellectual rigor of its essays and the generosity of its scholarly apparatus, merits a long and healthy shelf life.' Katherine G. Charles, Eighteenth-Century Fiction
‘Anthologies of satire have noticeably ignored women satirists; much of the satire in their poetic, dramatic, and fictional works has been overlooked, dismissed, or ignored. This important collection of essays on women satirists is a major step toward correcting this glaring oversight.’ Vivian Zuluaga Papp, The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cat
‘This collection of thirteen essays offers a thought-provoking and enjoyable read, one that builds productively on recent major studies of eighteenth-century satire to argue that women writers played an innovative and productive role in it literary development. The individual essays, like satire itself, are always in dialogue, each contributor circling us backward and forward to recurrent ideas and acknowledging expanding trajectories. There is a true cohesion among the essays, and they function as a useful whole. Hiner and Tasker Davis should be commended for overseeing and fostering this careful and hugely valuable work that achieves its core mission of offering a theoretical and contextual framework for ongoing research.’ Claudine van Hensbergen, Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal
‘… the editors of this collection deserve warm praise for the 'Selected List of Eighteenth-Century Women Writers and their Satiric Works' which they append to the volume, and for the excellent 'Selected Bibliography and Guide to Further Reading', both of which should facilitate ground-breaking research in the future. The quality of the essays gathered in the volume is also striking.’ The Year's Work in English Studies
Product details
April 2022Hardback
9781108837361
276 pages
235 × 157 × 22 mm
0.595kg
Available
Table of Contents
- Introduction Amanda Hiner and Elizabeth Tasker Davis
- Part I. Traditions and Breaks:
- 1. Women Writers and Juvenal: 'singing plain truths' Paul Baines
- 2. Unlocking the Dressing Room: Mary Evelyn's Mundus Muliebris Melinda Alliker Rabb
- 3. Aphra Behn and Traditions of Satire Tanya Caldwell
- 4. Delarivier Manley: Satire as Conversation Rachel Carnell
- 5. The Pleasures of Satire in the Fables of Anne Finch Sharon Smith
- Part II. Publicity and Print Culture: Women Satirists during the Mid-Eighteenth Century:
- 6. Women's Satires of the Literary Marketplace in Eighteenth-Century England Catherine Ingrassia
- 7. Charlotte Lennox, Satirical Poetry, and the Rise of Participatory Democracy Susan Carlile
- 8. Jane Collier's Satirical Fable: Teeth, Claws, and Moral Authority in An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting Martha F. Bowden
- 9. Hiding in Plain Sight: Frances Burney as Satiric Novelist Marilyn Francus
- Part III. Moral Debates and Satiric Dialogue: Women Satirists and Eighteenth-Century Sociability:
- 10. Anne Finch, Anna Seward, and Women's Relation to Formal Verse Satire in the Long Eighteenth Century Claudia Thomas Kairoff
- 11. Satire as Gossip: Lady Anne Hamilton's The Epics of the Ton Michael Edson
- 12. 'An invisible spy': Mary Robinson's Sylphid and the Image of the Satirist Rayna Rosenova
- 13. Austen's Menippean Experiments: Paternalism and Empire in the Juvenilia and Mansfield Park Danielle Spratt.
