Writing Eighteenth-Century Women's Literary History, 1986 to 2006

Abstract

Under the influence of feminist theory and criticism, the late 1980s saw a flowering of literary histories of eighteenth-century women writers. This work was very influential in assuming the existence of a distinct women's literary history conditioned by an increasingly rigid gender ideology of the time, in focusing on the novel genre, and in creating appreciation for the more recognizably feminist writers of the early and latter portions of the ‘long eighteenth century’. Subsequent work questioned the dependence of these histories on the ‘separate spheres’ model of gender, on a limited group of genres associated with women and with the literary, and on notions of feminism congenial to the late-twentieth-century critic. More broadly, feminist generalizations of women's experience were challenged by the rise of class, race and sexuality studies, while the very enterprise of historiography was placed under suspicion by postmodernist criticism of master narratives and of claims to objective interpretation of evidence. In response, studies of eighteenth-century women's writing began to attend to a broader range of genres and spheres of action within the larger field of print culture, as well as to produce more nuanced studies of individual writers and the conditions within which they wrote. However, general literary studies remained dependent on the models of the 1980s, while writers seemed reluctant to write new literary histories. Only recently are there indications of a return to large-scale women's literary histories. This return revises the pioneering work of the 1980s by attending to new, detailed studies of numerous individual writers, expanding generic coverage, incorporating electronic resources, experimenting with inclusive studies of male and female writers, and reconsidering questions of literary value.