Women's Writing and the Circulation of Ideas


Book Description

This book examines the writing and manuscript publication of key authors from 1550 to 1800.




Quilt Culture


Book Description

"As a blanket, a commemorative covering, and a work of art, the quilt is a nearly universal cultural artifact. In recent years it has been recognized as one of our most compelling symbols of cultural diversity and the power of women. In this collection, Cheryl B. Torsney and Judy Elsley bring together eleven provocative essays on the quilt as metaphor--in literature, history, politics, and philosophy. This interdisciplinary approach makes Quilt Culture an extraordinarily rich exploration of a cultural artifact whose meaning is far more complex than that of a simple bed covering."--Publishers website.




A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies


Book Description

A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies Jane Barker Jane Barker (1652-1732) was a popular English fiction writer, poet, and a staunch Jacobite. She went into self-imposed exile when James II fled England during the Glorious Revolution in 1688. Her novels, The Amours of Bosvil and Galesia, also published as Love Intrigues (1713), Exilius or The Banish'd Roman/ (1715), A Patchwork Screen for the Ladies (1723), and The Lining of the Patchwork Screen for the Ladies (1726) were written after she returned to London in 1704. Prior to and during her exile, she wrote a collection of poems justifying the value of feminine education and female single life, "Poetical Recreations" (1688), and a group of political poems, "A Collection of Poems Referring to the Times" (1701), which conveyed her anxiety about the political future of England. We are delighted to publish this classic book as part of our extensive Classic Library collection. Many of the books in our collection have been out of print for decades, and therefore have not been accessible to the general public. The aim of our publishing program is to facilitate rapid access to this vast reservoir of literature, and our view is that this is a significant literary work, which deserves to be brought back into print after many decades. The contents of the vast majority of titles in the Classic Library have been scanned from the original works. To ensure a high quality product, each title has been meticulously hand curated by our staff. Our philosophy has been guided by a desire to provide the reader with a book that is as close as possible to ownership of the original work. We hope that you will enjoy this wonderful classic work, and that for you it becomes an enriching experience.




A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies


Book Description

Jane Barker (1652-1732) was an English poet and novelist of the early 18th century. The Amours of Bosvil and Galesia (1713) was considered her most successful work. A staunch Jacobite, she followed King James II of England into exile at Saint- Germain-en-Laye in France shortly after James' defeat in the Glorious Revolution (1688). During her exile, she wrote a group of political poems, A Collection of Poems Referring to the Times (1701), which conveyed her anxiety towards the political future of England. She later became a novelist and wrote Exilius; or, The Banished Roman (1715), A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (1723) and The Lining of the Patch-Work Screen (1726). Barker was never married and her works show a strong lack of interest in marriage. Instead, she sought to challenge the status quo of female subordination.




The Galesia Trilogy and Selected Manuscript Poems of Jane Barker


Book Description

Hybrid in genre the works of Jane Barker include realistic stories, romances, poetry, religious & philosophical reflections and critiques of early 18th century England. She was a religious convert, poet and some of the time a Jacobite spy.




Novel Beginnings


Book Description

In this study intended for general readers, eminent critic Patricia Meyer Spacks provides a fresh, engaging account of the early history of the English novel. Novel Beginnings departs from the traditional, narrow focus on the development of the realistic novel to emphasize the many kinds of experimentation that marked the genre in the eighteenth century before its conventions were firmly established in the nineteenth. Treating well-known works like Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy in conjunction with less familiar texts such as Sarah Fielding’s The Cry (a kind of hybrid novel and play) and Jane Barker’s A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (a novel of adventure replete with sentimental verse and numerous subnarratives), the book evokes the excitement of a multifaceted and unpredictable process of growth and change. Investigating fiction throughout the 1700s, Spacks delineates the individuality of specific texts while suggesting connections among novels. She sketches a wide range of forms and themes, including Providential narratives, psychological thrillers, romans à clef, sentimental parables, political allegories, Gothic romances, and many others. These multiple narrative experiments show the impossibility of thinking of eighteenth-century fiction simply as a precursor to the nineteenth-century novel, Spacks shows. Instead, the vast variety of engagements with the problems of creating fiction demonstrates that literary history—by no means inexorable—might have taken quite a different course.




The Galesia Trilogy and Selected Manuscript Poems of Jane Barker


Book Description

This volume gathers three novels along with other important work by Jane Barker (1652-1732), a writer, manager of farm property, Roman Catholic convert, Jacobite in exile in France, and woman unmarried by choice.




Antigone's Example


Book Description

This book investigates early modern women’s interventions in politics and the public sphere during times of civil war in England and France. Taking this transcultural and comparative perspective, and the period designation “early modern” expansively, Antigone’s Example identifies a canon of women’s civil-war writings; it elucidates their historical specificity as well as the transhistorical context of civil war, a context which, it argues, enabled women’s participation in political thought.




Women, Work, and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel


Book Description

This book charts the novel's vibrant engagement with clothes, examining how fiction revises and reshapes material objects within its pages.