Place and publication

Sarah Prescott*

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapter

    Abstract

    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.

    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationThe Cambridge Companion to Women's Writing in Britain, 1660-1789
    EditorsCatherine Ingrassia
    PublisherCambridge University Press
    Chapter3
    Pages55-69
    Number of pages15
    ISBN (Electronic)9781139003810
    ISBN (Print)9781107013162, 9781107600980
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 23 Apr 2015

    Publication series

    NameCambridge Companions to Literature
    PublisherCambridge University Press

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