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Women and the book in Britain's long eighteenth century
Author(s) -
Levy Michelle
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
literature compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.158
H-Index - 4
ISSN - 1741-4113
DOI - 10.1111/lic3.12581
Subject(s) - scholarship , print culture , reading (process) , literacy , history , literature , period (music) , reception theory , intermediary , sociology , gender studies , classics , art , aesthetics , law , political science , marketing , business
This survey synthesizes and examines existing scholarship on women's practices and positions within eighteenth‐century British book culture. Since feminist scholarship began in the 1980s, the recovery of women's literary history has been largely focused on recovering their written contributions in print. However, more recently, eighteenth centuryists have noticed the interconnections between oral, written and print cultures; engaged in bibliographical studies on the significance of the expansion of print and the book trades; and considered how rising literacy rates and diverse reading practices shaped culture. Women, as writers and readers, and as intermediaries in the production and circulation of culture, played a critical role in shaping these developments. This essay reviews the considerable scholarship that addresses women's various engagements with book culture, research that collectively has generated a more capacious understanding of the history of books in the long eighteenth century and the women who produced, shared and read them.