A feminine enlightenment : British women writers and the philosophy of progress, 1759-1820 / [electronic resource]
DeLucia, JoEllen,author.
Drawing on original archival research, A Feminine Enlightenment argues that women writers shaped Enlightenment conversations regarding the role of sentiment and gender in the civilizing process. By reading women's literature alongside history and philosophy and moving between the eighteenth century and Romantic era, JoEllen DeLucia challenges conventional historical and generic boundaries. Beginning with Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), she tracks discussions of 'women's progress' from the rarified atmosphere of mid-eighteenth-century Bluestocking salons and the masculine domain of the Scottish university system to the popular Minerva Press novels of the early nineteenth century. Ultimately, this study positions feminine genres such as the Gothic romance and Bluestocking poetry, usually seen as outliers in a masculine Age of Reason, as essential to understanding emotion's role in Enlightenment narratives of progress. The effect of this study is twofold: to show how developments in women's literature reflected and engaged with Enlightenment discussions of emotion, sentiment, and commercial and imperial expansion; and to provide new literary and historical contexts for contemporary conversations that continue to use 'women's progress' to assign cultures and societies around the globe a place in universalizing schemas of development.    Key Features:   * Establishes the centrality of gender to Enlightenment discussions of social and historical development   *  Uncovers evidence of women writers' participation in the Scottish Enlightenment's theorization of sentiment and historical progress   *Provides literary and historical background for ongoing discussions of the history of emotion and the study of affect
Specialized.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Specialized.
Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 08 Aug 2016).
Introduction: A feminine enlightenment? -- The progress of feeling: The Ossian poems and Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments -- Ossiania history and Bluestocking feminism -- Queering progress: Anna Seward and Llangollen Vale -- Poetry, paratext, and history in Radcliffe's gothic -- Stadial fiction or the progress of taste -- Epilogue: Women writers in the age of Ossian.
Drawing on original archival research, A Feminine Enlightenment argues that women writers shaped Enlightenment conversations regarding the role of sentiment and gender in the civilizing process. By reading women's literature alongside history and philosophy and moving between the eighteenth century and Romantic era, JoEllen DeLucia challenges conventional historical and generic boundaries. Beginning with Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), she tracks discussions of 'women's progress' from the rarified atmosphere of mid-eighteenth-century Bluestocking salons and the masculine domain of the Scottish university system to the popular Minerva Press novels of the early nineteenth century. Ultimately, this study positions feminine genres such as the Gothic romance and Bluestocking poetry, usually seen as outliers in a masculine Age of Reason, as essential to understanding emotion's role in Enlightenment narratives of progress. The effect of this study is twofold: to show how developments in women's literature reflected and engaged with Enlightenment discussions of emotion, sentiment, and commercial and imperial expansion; and to provide new literary and historical contexts for contemporary conversations that continue to use 'women's progress' to assign cultures and societies around the globe a place in universalizing schemas of development.    Key Features:   * Establishes the centrality of gender to Enlightenment discussions of social and historical development   *  Uncovers evidence of women writers' participation in the Scottish Enlightenment's theorization of sentiment and historical progress   *Provides literary and historical background for ongoing discussions of the history of emotion and the study of affect
English literature
English literature