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Women Writing Fancy

Authorship and Autonomy from 1611 to 1812

  • Book
  • © 2017

Overview

Authors:
  1. Maura Smyth

    1. Boston, USA

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  • Revitalizes an important but dismissed trope in literary history and the history of gender studies
  • Examines a wealth of source material including works by Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, Eliza Haywood, and Anna Barbauld
  • Re-conceptualizes the vitality of Fancy as a feminist mode of thought, becoming the first full-length study to do so

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Table of contents (8 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-x
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  2. Introduction: Fancy—The Untold Story of an Aesthetic Rogue

    • Maura Smyth
    Pages 1-38

  3. Defining Modernity and Fixing Fancy

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 39-39
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    2. Threads That Go Nowhere in The Tempest and The New Atlantis

      • Maura Smyth
      Pages 41-73

    3. Finding Fancy in Leviathan and Paradise Lost

      • Maura Smyth
      Pages 75-112

  4. Talking Back: Fanciful ‘Creatoresses’ of the Novel

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 113-113
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    2. Margaret Cavendish’s Fashioning of Fancy

      • Maura Smyth
      Pages 115-150

    3. Going Undercover with Aphra Behn’s “Female Pen”

      • Maura Smyth
      Pages 151-197

    4. Plotting Fancy in The New Atalantis and Fantomina

      • Maura Smyth
      Pages 199-236

  5. Fancy’s Afterlife

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 237-237
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    2. Afterword: Fancy and the Tinctures, Tones, and Flavors of History

      • Maura Smyth
      Pages 239-265

    3. Coda: The Persistence of Fancy

      • Maura Smyth
      Pages 267-272

  6. Back Matter

    Pages 273-295
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Keywords

About this book

This book brings to the foreground the largely forgotten “Fancy” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and follows its traces as they extend into the nineteenth and twentieth. Trivialized for its flightiness and femininity, Fancy nonetheless provided seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women writers such as Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, Eliza Haywood, and Anna Barbauld a mode of vision that could detect flaws in the Enlightenment’s patriarchal systems and glimpse new, female-authored worlds and genres. In carving out unreal, fanciful spaces within the larger frame of patriarchal culture, these women writers planted Fancy—and, with it, female authorial invention—at the cornerstone of Enlightenment empirical endeavor. By finally taking Fancy seriously, this book offers an alternate genealogy of female authorship and a new framework for understanding modernity’s triumph.

Reviews

“It offers not only an entirely new way of thinking about how creativity was conceptualized in the early modern period, but also a model of fine-grained, imaginative textual criticism that gives proper consideration to the fleeting, overlooked, and imperfect spaces in which such creativity was practiced by women.” (Natasha Simonova, Early Modern Women Journal, Vol. 14 (1), 2019)

Authors and Affiliations

  • Boston, USA

    Maura Smyth

About the author

Maura Smyth is Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Previously, she was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows

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