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Bluestocking Studies: the State of the Field – and into the Future
Author(s) -
Heller Deborah
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
literature compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.158
H-Index - 4
ISSN - 1741-4113
DOI - 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2011.00789.x
Subject(s) - enlightenment , feminism , state (computer science) , field (mathematics) , salon , blues , public sphere , sociology , aesthetics , literature , history , art , law , art history , gender studies , epistemology , politics , philosophy , political science , mathematics , algorithm , computer science , pure mathematics
Although Sylvia Myers’s groundbreaking book, The Bluestocking Circle , was published in 1990, the field of Bluestocking Studies did not gain critical momentum until some 12 years ago, when two developments (the demolition of the ‘domestic thesis’ and the English translation of Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere ) had opened the way for a new approach. It was now realized that the Bluestockings were not mere salon ‘hostesses’ and harmless dabblers in men’s intellectual culture; rather they were innovative agents in 18th‐century culture and society and were full participants in, indeed fashioners of, the Enlightenment. The present essay reviews the scholarly literature, praising advances where appropriate and censuring retrograde tendencies when necessary. It criticizes the ahistorical imposition of 20th‐century feminism onto the Blues, and it challenges certain orthodoxies, empty clichés, and facile generalizations. It argues that the Bluestockings were not a ‘circle’ and Elizabeth Montagu was not ‘Queen of the Blues’. The Bluestockings were rather a loosely bounded system of separate but interrelated groups of persons or influences. Looking toward the future, the way to move ahead in Bluestocking Studies is to go back ad fontes – to the sources.