Women Scholarship And Criticism C 1790 1900

This innovative volume explores a wide range of artistic, critical, and cultural productions by women scholars, critics, and artists between 1790 and 1900, many of whom are little known. The essays question the concepts of “scholarship,” “criticism,” and “artist” across different disciplines, focusing on the gendered associations and exclusions and on structures of sexual difference. Women discussed include Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Sydney Morgan, and Anna Jameson; actresses such as Elizabeth Siddons, Dorothy Jordan, and Mary Robinson; critics such as Margaret Oliphant and Mary Cowden Clarke; historians such as Agnes Strickland, Lucy Aikin, Mary Anne Everett Green, Elizabeth Cooper, and Lucy Toulmin Smith; the writers and readers of women's magazines; educationalists such as the Shirreff sisters, and translators such as Anna Swanwick, as well as many others.

Eine erhellende Studie, die Impulse der Gender Studies für die Wissenschaftsgeschichte aufzuzeigen vermag. Auch Wissenschaft hat ein Geschlecht. Die Konsequenzen dieser These untersucht der vorliegende Band am Beispiel der Kulturwissenschaften. Mit dem Zeitraum von 1890 bis 1945 konzentriert er sich auf jene Epoche, in der sich die Universitäten für die Frauen öffnen und sie zum ersten Mal regulär am System Wissenschaft partizipieren läßt. Das Verhältnis von Wissenschaft und Geschlechterdifferenz kommt dabei in seiner Vielgestaltigkeit in den Blick: Es wird einerseits auf der Ebene des wissenschaftlichen Diskurses, seiner Rhetorik und seiner Epistemologie, analysiert. Andererseits wird die Arbeit einzelner Wissenschaftlerinnen, die innerhalb oder jenseits des universitären Betriebs tätig waren (z.B. Hilma Borelius, Ricarda Huch, Vernon Lee), vorgestellt. So belegen die fünfzehn internationalen Beiträge aus ganz verschiedenen Perspektiven, welche Impulse die Gender Studies der Wissenschaftsgeschichte zu vermitteln mögen. Aus dem Inhalt: Ben Knights: Reading as a Man: Women and the Rise of English Studies in England Sylvia Mieszkowski: Vernon Lee - Gen(i)us Loci of Academic Periphery Gesa Dane: Ricarda Huchs Romantik und Der Dreißigjährige Krieg Alexandra Tischel: Die Arbeiten der Germanistin Helene Herrmann Barbara Hahn: 'Wunderbar artikulierte Herrscherin im Reich des Bewußten'. Ricarda Huch und ihre Zeitgenossen Annegret Heitmann: Die >neue Frau

The first full-length study of Shakespeare's influence on Victorian women writers, actresses and readers.

Contends that gender politics were influential in the early development of literary criticism and the writings of female critics

1790 saw the publication of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France -- the definitive tract of modern conservatism as a political philosophy. Though women of the period wrote texts that clearly responded to and reacted against Burke's conception of English history and to the contemporary political events that continued to shape it, this conversation was largely ignored or dismissed, and much of it remains to be reconsidered today. Examining the works of women writers from Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft to the Strickland sisters and Mary Anne Everett Green, this book begins to recuperate that conversation and in doing so uncovers a more complete and nuanced picture of women's participation in the writing of history. Professor Mary Spongberg puts forward an alternate, feminized historiography of Britain that demonstrates how women writers' recourse to history caused them to become generically innovative and allowed them to participate in the political debates that framed the emergence of modern British historiography, and to push back against the Whig interpretation of history that predominated from 1790-1860.

The author of numerous books on Geoffrey Chaucer, the nineteenth-century scholar, Mary Eliza Haweis, has been largely erased from general histories of Chaucer studies. In her critical biography, Mary Flowers Braswell traces Haweis’s career, bringing her out of obscurity and placing her contributions to Chaucer scholarship in the context of those of influential Chaucerians of the period such as Frederick James Furnivall, Walford Dakin Selby, and Walter Rye. Braswell draws on extensive archival research from a broad range of late-Victorian newspapers, journals, and society papers to weave a fascinating picture of Haweis’s own life and work, which in quantity and quality rivaled that of her contemporaries. Haweis, we discover, corrected assumptions related to the Chaucer seal and texts, bringing her findings to the attention of the public in works such as Chaucer for Schools, the first textbook on the poet. Braswell also sheds light on the ways in which fashion, society, culture, art, and leisure activities intermingled with scholarship, archival recovery, museum work, editing, writing, and publishing in the late-Victorian middle and upper classes. Concluding with a discussion of Haweis’s forgotten role as head of the Chaucer section for the National Home Reading Union, Braswell’s book makes a strong case both for Haweis’s influence as a Chaucer scholar and her importance as an educator in nineteenth-century Britain and the United States.

Henry James wrote of Lucy Aikin: “Clever, sagacious, shrewd ... and an accomplished writer, one wonders why her vigorous intellectual temperament has not attracted independent notice.” The most important long poem by a woman from the British Romantic era, Aikin’s Epistles on Women (1810) is the first text in English to re-write the entire history of western culture, from the creation story of Genesis through the eighteenth century, from a feminist perspective. Responding to Alexander Pope’s misogynistic “Epistle to a Lady,” Aikin argues that men’s degradation of women has hindered the growth of civilization, and provides historical and literary evidence for her claim that “man cannot degrade woman without degrading himself.” In addition to Epistles on Women, this Broadview Edition also includes a wide selection of poetry, historical writing, fiction, memoir, and literary criticism by Aikin, as well as letters, contemporary reviews, and other feminist historiographies.

Recent criticism is now fully appreciating the nuanced and complex contribution made by Dissenters to the culture and ideas of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain. This is the first sustained study of a Dissenting family - the Aikins - from the 1740s to the 1860s. Essays by literary critics, historians of religion and science, and geographers explore and contextualize the achievements of this remarkable family, including John Aikin senior, tutor at the celebrated Warrington Academy, and his children, poet Anna Letitia Barbauld, and John Aikin junior, literary physician and editor. The latter's children in turn were leading professionals and writers in the early Victorian era. This study provides new perspectives on the social and cultural importance of the family and their circle - an untold story of collaboration and exchange, and a narrative which breaks down period boundaries to set Enlightenment and Victorian culture in dialogue.