Deconstructing Reliance on Enlightenment Methods in Feminist Book Historical Scholarship

Abstract

Historically, canonical novels have been written primarily by men either for other men or for the “education” of women to encourage conformity to patriarchal standards. Yet, throughout much of the eighteenth century, novels written by and for women outsold most materials written by their male counterparts. Nevertheless, scholarship on the female writer and reader has been difficult to find or produce, mainly due to inherited structures that prevent radical feminist scholarship from flourishing. This essay examines the Western scholarly reliance on white, hetero, Eurocentric thought and knowledge-production and describes how those power structures discourage new methods of scholarship. It looks to feminist and queer literary theorists and book historians for a paradigm of future scholarship that prioritizes ways of knowing outside the Enlightenment model.