Women Writers and the Edinburgh Enlightenment

Erscheinungsjahr 2010
ISBN: 978-90-420-3137-1
Verlag: Brill | Rodopi

Buch, Englisch, Band 15, 320 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 508 g

Reihe: SCROLL: Scottish Cultural Review of Language and Literature

This volume provides an overview of women writers in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Edinburgh literary world. Its main focus is on the careers of three women – Elizabeth Hamilton, Anne Grant, and Christian Isobel Johnstone – who were both successful and influential in their own day, although they have tended to be overlooked in later literary history. Hamilton’s work is discussed in the contexts of her lifelong interest in moral philosophy and educational theory, while Grant, admired in her day for her letters, essays, and poetry about the Highlands, is read through eighteenth-century theories of cultural history and primitivism. Johnstone, probably the most obscure of the three today, was perhaps the most influential at the time because of her role as editor of a series of political periodicals; her fiction and journalistic work is examined in the context of the early nineteenth-century Edinburgh magazines.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literatursoziologie, Gender Studies
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements
Introduction: “Excellent Women, and not too Blue”: Women Writers in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Edinburgh
Enlightening the Female Mind: Education, Sociability, and the Literary Woman in the Work of Elizabeth Hamilton
“Incongruous Things”: Primitivism and Professionalism in the Work of Anne Grant
“Scarcely Known to Fame”: The Literary Identities of Christian Isobel Johnstone
Conclusion: Modesty, Money, and Nostalgia: Narratives of Women’s Writing in Edinburgh’s “Age of Greatness”
Bibliography
Index