From Feminist to Integrationist Literary History: 18th Century Studies 2005–2013

Abstract Feminist research has explored the specific qualities of female works and the intertextual relations between them. By now, the time has come to transcend the model of ‘a literature of their own’ and to inquire into the influences, interconnections and processes of cooperation between men and women. Ideally, future literary histories would trace patterns of heterosocial interaction. My essay shows how recent scholarship has been working towards this aim. Monographs on individual women writers favour descriptive and interpretative categories with masculine connotations, thus opening up possibilities of relating female to male literary production. Studies of groups of women similarly foreground a collective interest in ‘male’ topics (such as politics, revolution, reason or history) and read the works as feminine‐inflected discussions of subjects of general interest. Case studies of male and female literary cooperation supply samples for the new kind of historiography by exploring the dynamics of transgender creative processes. Most importantly, scholars are beginning to discern communities of male and female writers and heterosocial intertextual lineages, thereby suggesting synchronic and diachronic patterns for integrationist historiography.