TY - CHAP
T1 - Place and publication
AU - Prescott, Sarah
PY - 2015/4/23
Y1 - 2015/4/23
N2 - The years from 1660 to 1780 witnessed profound changes in the circumstances of women's literary production as a cultural world primarily dominated by manuscript circulation slowly gave way to a marketplace for literature dominated by print. Accounts of women's writing in the light of these broader phenomena tend to emphasize shifts in gender roles, the increasing acceptance of the figure of the woman writer in public life, and women's expanding access to print alongside the rise of the novel form as the dominant literary genre. What is less fully documented is the way in which women's writing develops in response to the changes happening throughout Britain in relation to the geographical development of the English provinces and the interactive and sometime oppositional relationship of the constituent parts of the British archipelago – England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales – to one another. This chapter takes the geographical location of women writers as its main object of enquiry to ask the following questions: how does geographical location directly shape what women were publishing, their perception of themselves as writers, and their reception in literary culture? In what ways might a provincial location have enabled women's literary production? And finally, who were the women writing from Ireland, Scotland, and Wales in this period and how did national affiliation shape them as writers and inform their texts? Focusing on non-metropolitan, provincial, and rural locations as enabling sites of literary production opens up new ways of constructing women's literary history that move away from conventional binaries of center/margin, core/periphery, and indeed manuscript/print culture. Furthermore, archipelagic perspectives that take into account all four nations of Britain not only allow for a study of writers from non-English locations but also provide new templates for understanding how writers can interact with and be shaped by multiple geopolitical contexts. The conventional view of a stark division between life in London and that in the English provinces, as well as between England and its Celtic neighbors, is starting to be challenged by early modern and eighteenth-century scholarship on women's engagement in provincial literary networks, coteries, and different national traditions.
AB - The years from 1660 to 1780 witnessed profound changes in the circumstances of women's literary production as a cultural world primarily dominated by manuscript circulation slowly gave way to a marketplace for literature dominated by print. Accounts of women's writing in the light of these broader phenomena tend to emphasize shifts in gender roles, the increasing acceptance of the figure of the woman writer in public life, and women's expanding access to print alongside the rise of the novel form as the dominant literary genre. What is less fully documented is the way in which women's writing develops in response to the changes happening throughout Britain in relation to the geographical development of the English provinces and the interactive and sometime oppositional relationship of the constituent parts of the British archipelago – England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales – to one another. This chapter takes the geographical location of women writers as its main object of enquiry to ask the following questions: how does geographical location directly shape what women were publishing, their perception of themselves as writers, and their reception in literary culture? In what ways might a provincial location have enabled women's literary production? And finally, who were the women writing from Ireland, Scotland, and Wales in this period and how did national affiliation shape them as writers and inform their texts? Focusing on non-metropolitan, provincial, and rural locations as enabling sites of literary production opens up new ways of constructing women's literary history that move away from conventional binaries of center/margin, core/periphery, and indeed manuscript/print culture. Furthermore, archipelagic perspectives that take into account all four nations of Britain not only allow for a study of writers from non-English locations but also provide new templates for understanding how writers can interact with and be shaped by multiple geopolitical contexts. The conventional view of a stark division between life in London and that in the English provinces, as well as between England and its Celtic neighbors, is starting to be challenged by early modern and eighteenth-century scholarship on women's engagement in provincial literary networks, coteries, and different national traditions.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84954225485&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - https://www.cambridge.org/gb/universitypress/subjects/literature/english-literature-1700-1830/cambridge-companion-womens-writing-britain-16601789?format=HB
U2 - 10.1017/CBO9781139003810.005
DO - 10.1017/CBO9781139003810.005
M3 - Chapter
AN - SCOPUS:84954225485
SN - 9781107013162
SN - 9781107600980
T3 - Cambridge Companions to Literature
SP - 55
EP - 69
BT - The Cambridge Companion to Women's Writing in Britain, 1660-1789
A2 - Ingrassia, Catherine
PB - Cambridge University Press
ER -