Munster Village

Reproduction of the original: Munster Village by Mary Hamilton

"Munster Village" by Lady Mary Hamilton is a seminal example of feminist literature. Hamilton was an early believer that men and women should be treated as equals in a society where women were considered useful for their beauty, their abilities as mothers, and their ability to keep their homes well-organized. This book is an example of utopia, a fantastical future imagined by Hamilton where women didn't have to worry about being mistreated by society as they're considered important and equal parts of society compared to men.

No human society has ever been perfect, a fact that has led thinkers as far back as Plato and St. Augustine to conceive of utopias both as a fanciful means of escape from an imperfect reality and as a useful tool with which to design improvements upon it. The most studied utopias have been proposed by men, but during the eighteenth century a group of reform-oriented female novelists put forth a series of work that expressed their views of, and their reservations about, ideal societies. In Women's Utopias of the Eighteenth Century, Alessa Johns examines the utopian communities envisaged by Mary Astell, Sarah Fielding, Mary Hamilton, Sarah Scott, and other writers from Britain and continental Europe, uncovering the ways in which they resembled--and departed from--traditional utopias. Johns demonstrates that while traditional visions tended to look back to absolutist models, women's utopias quickly incorporated emerging liberal ideas that allowed far more room for personal initiative and gave agency to groups that were not culturally dominant, such as the female writers themselves. Women's utopias, Johns argues, were reproductive in nature. They had the potential to reimagine and perpetuate themselves.

The appearance of James Macpherson's Ossian in the 1760s caused an international sensation. The discovery of poetic fragments that seemed to have survived in the Highlands of Scotland for some 1500 years gripped the imagination of the reading public, who seized eagerly on the newly available texts for glimpses of a lost primitive world. That Macpherson's versions of the ancient heroic verse were more creative adaptations of the oral tradition than literal translations of a clearly identifiable original may have exercised contemporary antiquarians and contributed eventually to a decline in the popularity of Ossian. Yet for most early readers, as for generations of enthusiastic followers, what mattered was not the accuracy of the translation, but the excitement of encountering the primitive, and the mood engendered by the process of reading. The essays in this collection represent an attempt by late twentieth-century readers to chart the cultural currents that flowed into Macpherson's texts, and to examine their peculiar energy. Scholars distinguished in the fields of Gaelic, German, Irish, Scottish, French, English and American literature, language, history and cultural studies have each contributed to the exploration of Macpherson's achievement, with the aim of situating his notoriously elusive texts in a web of diverse contexts. Important new research into the traditional Gaelic sources is placed side by side with discussions of the more immediate political impetus of his poetry, while studies of the reception of Ossian in Scotland, Germany, France and England are part of the larger recognition of the cultural significance of Macpherson's work, and its importance to issues of fragmentation, liminality, colonialism, national identity, sensibility and gender.

Utopian fiction was a particularly rich and important genre during the eighteenth century. It was during this period that a relatively new phenomenon appeared: the merging of utopian writing per se with other fictional genres, such as the increasingly dominant novel. However, while early modern and nineteenth and twentieth century utopias have been the focus of much attention, the eighteenth century has largely been neglected. Utopian Imagination and Eighteenth Century Fiction combines these major areas of interest, interpreting some of the most fascinating and innovative fictions of the period and locating them in a continuing tradition of utopian writing which stretches back through the Renaissance to the Ancient World. Begining with a survey of the recurrent topics in utopian writing - power structures in the state, money, food, sex, the role of women, birth, education and death - the book brings together canonical eighteenth century texts countaining powerful utopian elements, such as Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels and Rasselas, and less familiar works, to examine the reworking of these topics in a new context. The unfamiliar texts, including Gaudentio di Lucca, are described in detail to give students an idea of relevant material across a broad area. A section is devoted specifically to women writes, an area which has become the focus of attention. The mixture of texts provides a useful cross-reference for students tackling the subject from various perspectives and the comprehensive bibliography provides a valuable tool for those with general or specific interests