Rhetoric Medicine And The Woman Writer 1600 1700

A subtle yet wide-ranging study confirming the importance of rhetoric in physicians' rise to medical dominance and prestige.

In eighteenth-century Britain the worlds of literature and medicine were closely intertwined, and a diverse group of people participated in the circulation of medical knowledge. In this pre-professionalized milieu, several women writers made important contributions by describing a range of common yet often devastating illnesses. In Reimagining Illness Heather Meek reads works by six major eighteenth-century women writers – Jane Barker, Anne Finch, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Frances Burney – alongside contemporaneous medical texts to explore conditions such as hysteria, melancholy, smallpox, maternity, consumption, and breast cancer. In novels, poems, letters, and journals, these writers drew on their learning and literary skill as they engaged with and revised male-dominated medical discourse. Their works provide insight into the experience of suffering and interrogate accepted theories of women’s bodies and minds. In ways relevant both then and now, these women demonstrate how illness might be at once a bodily condition and a malleable construct full of ideological meaning and imaginative possibility. Reimagining Illness offers a new account of the vital period in medico-literary history between 1660 and 1815, revealing how the works of women writers not only represented the medicine of their time but also contributed meaningfully to its developments.

This book contains expansive, multifaceted narrative of British women's literary and textual production from the Reformation to the Restoration.

This groundbreaking study explores the later lives and late-life writings of more than two dozen British women authors active during the long eighteenth century. Drawing on biographical materials, literary texts, and reception histories, Devoney Looser finds that far from fading into moribund old age, female literary greats such as Anna Letitia Barbauld, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Catharine Macaulay, Hester Lynch Piozzi, and Jane Porter toiled for decades after they achieved acclaim -- despite seemingly concerted attempts by literary gatekeepers to marginalize their later contributions. Though these remarkable women wrote and published well into old age, Looser sees in their late careers the necessity of choosing among several different paths. These included receding into the background as authors of "classics," adapting to grandmotherly standards of behavior, attempting to reshape masculinized conceptions of aged wisdom, or trying to create entirely new categories for older women writers. In assessing how these writers affected and were affected by the culture in which they lived, and in examining their varied reactions to the prospect of aging, Looser constructs careful portraits of each of her Subjects and explains why many turned toward retrospection in their later works. In illuminating the powerful and often poorly recognized legacy of the British women writers who spurred a marketplace revolution in their earlier years only to find unanticipated barriers to acceptance in later life, Looser opens up new scholarly territory in the burgeoning field of feminist age studies.

This anthology brings together extensive selections of poetry by the live most prolific and prominent women poets of the English Civil War period: Anne Bradstreet, Hester Puller, Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips and Lucy Hutchinson. These poets participated in elite poetic culture at the highest level, writing elegies, panegyrics and epics; they were politically engaged; and their female authorship strategies were nuanced but clear, as they took diverse approaches to publication in manuscript and print. Their poetry is at the centre of discussion and debate about early modern women's poetry, but until now, substantial edited selections of their work have not been available in one place. The anthology brings together the most innovative, complex poems of each writer, revealing the diversity of women's poetry in the mid-seventeenth century, as it traversed political affiliations and material forms. This anthology presents poems in modern-spelling, clear-text versions for classroom use, and for ready comparison to mainstream editions of male poets' work. Notes on the poems and an introduction explain the contexts of the Civil War, religious conflict, and scientific and literary development, and will serve students' and academics' needs alike. Women poets of the English Civil War is ideal for use alongside mainstream anthologies of early modern poetry, enabling a more comprehensive understanding of seventeenth-century women's poetic culture, in its own right, and in relation to prominent male poets such as Marvell, Milton and Dryden.

This transhistorical, international and interdisciplinary work will be of interest to students, theater professionals and Shakespeare scholars.

This comprehensive resource features up-to-date bibliographical, biographical and contact information for approximately 20,000 living authors worldwide who have at least one English publication. Entries typically include name, pseudonyms, addresses, citizenship, birth date, specialization, career information and a bibliography. Contact information includes e-mail addresses where available.