Product Description

Revises established understandings of British women writers' contributions to Enlightenment narratives of social and historical progress

Drawing on original archival research, 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 (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