“Woman’s Writing and Gender Formation in the Eighteenth Century”
This section of “Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature” concerns one of the most important phenomena of the period between 1660 and 1800, an era of far-reaching change in British literature and culture. This was the entrance of women into the publishing market for the first time. Whereas women had previously written for coteries of private friends, women now gained access to the reading public. We will examine how women’s published writing both reflected and changed attitudes towards women in British society, generating the first proto-feminism but also considerable resistance from male authors and conservative women. We will also explore how the boundaries between “women” and “men” became harder, creating a rigid binary or “two sex” model of gender that persisted until recent times.
Texts: Aphra Behn, The Rover; Susanna Centlivre, Bold Stoke for a Wife; Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman; Inchbald, Nature and Art; a selection of poetry from Roger Lonsdale (ed.), Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology.
Assignments: two short essays, a final term paper, and a take-home exam