Women Writing Fancy

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 period witnessed the first full flowering of women's writing in Britain. This illuminating volume features leading scholars who draw upon the last 25 years of scholarship and textual recovery to demonstrate the literary and cultural significance of women in the period, discussing writers such as Austen, Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley.

A 2001 Companion providing an overview of the history of writing by women in nineteenth-century America.

Contemporary fantastic fiction, particularly that written by women, often challenges traditional literary practice. At the same time the predominantly male-authored canon of fantastic literature offers a problematic range of gender stereotypes for female authors to 're-write'.

Since the late twentieth century, there has been a strategic campaign to recover the impact of Victorian women writers in the field of English literature. However, with the increased understanding of the importance of interdisciplinarity in the twenty-first century, there is a need to extend this campaign beyond literary studies in order to recognise the role of women writers across the nineteenth century, a time that was intrinsically interdisciplinary in approach to scholarly writing and public intellectual engagement.

The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women's Writing brings together chapters by leading scholars to provide innovative and comprehensive coverage of Victorian women writers' careers and literary achievements. While incorporating the scholarly insights of modern feminist criticism, it also reflects new approaches to women authors that have emerged with the rise of book history; periodical studies; performance studies; postcolonial studies; and scholarship on authorship, readership, and publishing. It traces the Victorian woman writer's career - from making her debut to working with publishers and editors to achieving literary fame - and challenges previous thinking about genres in which women contributed with success. Chapters on poetry, including a discussion of poetry in colonial and imperial contexts, reveal women's engagements with each other and male writers. Discussions on drama, life writing, reviewing, history, travel writing, and children's literature uncover the remarkable achievement of women in fields relatively unknown.

This book explores gender inequity and the gender gap from a range of perspectives including historical, motherhood, professional life and diversity. Using a narrative approach, the book shares diverse experiences and perspectives of the gender gap and the pervasive impact it has. Through authors' in-depth insights and critical analysis, each chapter addresses the gender gap by providing a nuanced understanding of the impact of the particular lens. It shares a holistic understanding of lived experiences of gender inequity. The book offers interdisciplinary insights into current political, social, economic and cultural impacts on women and their lived experiences of inequity. It provides multiple voices from across the world and draws on narrative approaches to sharing evidence-based insights. It includes further insights and critique of each chapter to widen the perspectives shared as the gender gap is explored and provide rigorous discussion about what possibilities and challenges are inherent in the proposed solutions as well as offering new ones. Chapter 10 and chapter 11 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.