Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry

An ambitious and pioneering work of archeological excavation, one that will establish a foundation for the future study of eighteenth-century women poets and their poetry. A major contribution. -- Charles Haskell Hinnant, University of Missouri-Columbia

Offers a broad view of the writing and careers of eighteenth-century women poets, highlighting on the ways in which poetry was read and enjoyed, on changing poetic tastes in British culture, and on the development of many major poetic genres and traditions. It explores the forms in which women wrote and the uses to which they put those forms.This large-scale project aims to present a broad, original perspective on the writing and lives of eighteenth century (British) women poets. More specifically, it seeks to do so by giving close attention to the intersections of agency-as evident in the distinct ways in which women made use of poetry in their lives-and genre. Like some other recent scholars, Paula Backscheider here construes the latter term to include categories based on popular contemporary ideas of poems and their purposes, defined sometimes more by form and sometimes more by subject matter. She focuses in particular on the commonalities and differences, both of which she often finds revealing, between the functions of individual genres for men and for women. The roughly forty poets she considers are meant to constitute a diverse but not systematic or exhaustively comprehensive selection.