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Collecting Women

Poetry and Lives, 1700-1780

Chantel M Lavoie author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Bucknell University Press

Published:1st Nov '09

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Collecting Women cover

This book addresses the place of women writers in anthologies and other literary collections in eighteenth-century England. It explores and contextualizes the ways in which two different kinds of printed material—poetic miscellanies and biographical collections—complemented one another in defining expectations about the woman writer. Far more than the single-authored text, it was the collection in one form or another that invested poems and their authors with authority. By attending to this fascinating cultural context, Chantel Lavoie explores how women poets were placed posthumously in the world of eighteenth-century English letters. Investigating the lives and works of four well-known poets—Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, Anne Finch, and Elizabeth Rowe—Lavoie illuminates the ways in which celebrated women were collected alongside their poetry, the effect of collocation on individual reputations, and the intersection between bibliography and biography as female poets themselves became curiosities. In so doing, Collecting Women contributes to the understanding of the intersection of cultural history, canon formation, and literary collecting in eighteenth-century England.

Collecting Women is a remarkable book. It is a scrupulous, scholarly study of a highly important area of literature, with both theoretical and historical reach and importance. -- Barbara M. Benedict, Charles A. Dana Professor of English Literature, Trinity College

ISBN: 9781611483413

Dimensions: 243mm x 168mm x 17mm

Weight: 440g

215 pages