Review of Jennie Batchelor and Manushag N. Powell, eds, &lt;i&gt;Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690–1820s&lt;/i&gt; (2018)

Fauve Vandenberghe

doi:10.21825/jeps.v5i1.16530

Abstract

Review of Jennie Batchelor and Manushag N. Powell, eds, Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690–1820s (2018).

Highlights

Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690–1820s (2018) is a collection of thirty essays edited by Jennie Batchelor and Manushag N
Both established scholars in the relatively new but burgeoning field of eighteenth-century periodical studies. Their aims for this volume are laudably ambitious as they work to upend common misconceptions about women’s involvement in the production and consumption of periodicals. This volume takes as its starting point that ‘there is no periodical culture without women, full stop; nor is there any simple way to sum up women’s multifaceted importance to the genre and how they shaped its public power’ (p. 3)
In taking women writers as their focal point for discussing periodicals of the long eighteenth century, the contributors challenge several misconceptions that have run persistently through previous scholarship on eighteenth-century periodical culture, ranging from the ostensibly rigid divide between the public and private sphere, periodical readership, and the extent to which women were involved in the textual production of this period

Summary

Introduction

Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690–1820s (2018) is a collection of thirty essays edited by Jennie Batchelor and Manushag N. This multi-faceted approach to eighteenth-century women writers likewise comes to the fore in the many different and innovative methods that this volume manages to combine: contributors draw from, among other fields, recent developments in transnational studies, material-cultural studies, and reception theory.The collection makes important contributions to periodical studies, and has further implications in the fields of eighteenth-century women’s writing, print culture, novel studies, and poetry studies.

Results

Conclusion