Women’s Poetry in the Enlightenment: The Making of a Canon, 1730–1820

✍ Scribed by Isobel Armstrong, Virginia Blain (eds.)

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
• Year: 1999
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 236
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This collection of twelve critical essays on women's poetry of the eighteenth century and enlightenment is the first to range widely over individual poets and to undertake a comprehensive exploration of their work. Experiment with genre and form, the poetics of the body, the politics of gender, revolutionary critique, and patronage, are themes of the collection, which includes discussions of the distinctive projects of Mary Leapor, Ann Yearsley, Helen Maria Williams, Joanna Baillie, Charlotte Smith, Anna Barbauld and Lucy Aikin.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages i-xvi
Front Matter....Pages 1-1
Sensuousness in the Poetry of Eighteenth-Century Women Poets....Pages 3-32
‘All Passion Extinguish’ d’: The Case of Mary Chandler, 1687–1745....Pages 33-49
‘A Dialogue’: Elizabeth Carter’s Passion for the Female Mind....Pages 50-63
Front Matter....Pages 65-65
Mary Seymour Montague: Anonymity and ‘Old Satyrical Codes’....Pages 67-80
The Female Poet and the Poetess: Two Traditions of British Women’s Poetry, 1780–1830....Pages 81-98
The Politics of Vision: Anna Barbauld’s ‘Eighteen Hundred and Eleven’....Pages 99-110
Front Matter....Pages 111-111
‘This Muse-born Wonder’: the Occluded Voice of Ann Yearsley, Milkwoman and Poet of Clifton....Pages 113-126
The Maid and the Minister’s Wife: Literary Philanthropy in Regency York....Pages 127-141
Front Matter....Pages 143-143
Romantic Women Poets: Inscribing the Self....Pages 145-166
Homosocial Women: Martha Sansom, Constantia Grierson, Mary Leapor and Georgic Verse Epistle....Pages 167-183
Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets: Losses and Gains....Pages 184-198
Front Matter....Pages 199-199
Fashioning a Female Canon: Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and the Politics of the Anthology....Pages 201-215
Back Matter....Pages 216-226

✦ Subjects

Poetry and Poetics; Gender Studies; Early Modern/Renaissance Literature; Nineteenth-Century Literature