Dream And Literary Creation In Womens Writings In The Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

This edited collection deals with dream as a literary trope and as a source of creativity in women’s writings. It gathers essays spanning a time period from the end of the seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, with a strong focus on the Romantic period and particularly on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in which dreams are at the heart of the writing process but also constitute the diegetic substance of the narrative. The contributions re-examine the oneiric facets of the novel and develop fresh perspectives on dreams and dreaming in Mary Shelley’s fiction and on other female authors (Anne Finch, Ann Radcliffe, Emily and Charlotte Brontë and a few others), re-appraising the textuality of dreams and their link to women’s creativity and creation as a whole.

Theology in the Early British and Irish Gothic, 1764–1832 reassesses the relationship between contemporary theology and the Gothic. Investigating Gothic aesthetics, depictions of the supernatural and portrayals of religious organisations, it explores how the Gothic engages with contemporary theologies, both Dissenting and Anglican. Moving away from the emphasis on either a monolithic Protestantism or on the Gothic as a secular mode, it shows the ways in which the Gothic exploration of the transcendent and the obscure cannot be separated from the diverse theologies of its day. The project maps how the Gothic not only reflects but actively engages in the theological debates and controversies contemporary to its efflorescence.

Dream Revisionaries examines the literary, social, and historical catalysts for this sudden efflorescence of women's utopian writing. It delineates the historical contours of mainstream utopian fiction, examines the place of women in canonical texts, and demonstrates how the utopian responses of women in the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries paved the way for the late-19th-century texts discussed in this study. Lewes observes how women's utopian fiction facilitated the creation of political and social manifestos that responded to the late-19th-century historical environment and how nationality sometimes complicated and even overrode the authors' apparent commonalities. This volume demonstrates how the genre was used to reconcile historically opposed feminist ideologies and compares texts of the 1870s and 1970s, showing that the supposedly "new" type of women's utopian writing in many ways resembled that of a century earlier.

This volume examines the world of German women writers who emerged in the burgeoning literary marketplace of eighteenth-century Europe.

The book explores key South Asian writings on cultural theory and literary criticism. It discusses the dynamics of textual contents, rhetorical styles, and socio-political issues through an exploration of seminal South Asian scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The volume examines concepts and methods of critical studies. It also discusses colonial and postcolonial discourses on art, religion, nationalism, identity, representation, resistance, and gender in the South Asian context. The essays are accompanied by textual questions and intertextual discussions on rhetorical, creative, and critical aspects of the selected texts. The exercise questions invite the reader to explore the mechanics of reading about and writing on discursive pieces in South Asian studies. Comprehensive and interdisciplinary, this textbook will be indispensable for students and researchers of South Asian studies, cultural theory, literary criticism, postcolonial studies, literary and language studies, women and gender studies, rhetoric and composition, political sociology, and cultural studies.

This book brings to the foreground the largely forgotten “Fancy” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and follows its traces as they extend into the nineteenth and twentieth. Trivialized for its flightiness and femininity, Fancy nonetheless provided seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women writers such as Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, Eliza Haywood, and Anna Barbauld a mode of vision that could detect flaws in the Enlightenment’s patriarchal systems and glimpse new, female-authored worlds and genres. In carving out unreal, fanciful spaces within the larger frame of patriarchal culture, these women writers planted Fancy—and, with it, female authorial invention—at the cornerstone of Enlightenment empirical endeavor. By finally taking Fancy seriously, this book offers an alternate genealogy of female authorship and a new framework for understanding modernity’s triumph.

This volume charts the rise of professional women writers across diverse fields of intellectual enquiry and through different modes of writing in the period immediately before and during the reign of Queen Victoria. It demonstrates how, between 1830 and 1880, the woman writer became an agent of cultural formation and contestation, appealing to and enabling the growth of female readership while issuing a challenge to the authority of male writers and critics. Of especial importance were changing definitions of marriage, family and nation, of class, and of morality as well as new conceptions of sexuality and gender, and of sympathy and sensation. The result is a richly textured account of a radical and complex process of feminization whereby formal innovations in the different modes of writing by women became central to the aesthetic, social, and political formation of British culture and society in the nineteenth century.