Palgrave Literature Series
HISTORY OF BRITISH WOMEN'S WRITING
General Editors: Professor Cora Kaplan and Dr Jennie Batchelor
The History of British Women's Writing is a new ten volumes series. Edited by distinguished scholars, each volume will contain specially commissioned essays that chart the development of women's contribution to the world of letters within Great Britain from medieval times to the present.
As the research on women has moved from the margins to the confident centre of literary studies, it has become rich in essays and monographs which focus on specific writers, genres, periods and topics. Indeed scholarship on women's writing has grown so rapidly in the last quarter century that its expansion has outpaced any attempt to map its evolution, or to construct a long historical overview, even within one geographic and linguistic field.
The ambition of the series is to provide just such a cartographic standard work which will provide a clear and integrated picture of a very various and influential field of research. It aims to reflect ongoing critical debates and to point towards the future of the field. It will register the transformations which the intervention of this vital, ever-changing body of work has wrought on literary studies as a whole. Not only have more women writers become part of the larger literary canon, but gender-in language, authors, texts, audience and in the history of print culture itself- has become a central question for literary criticism and literary history.
The period covered by each volume will take into account both conventional literary periodisation and the particular historical and cultural circumstances that determined women's literary production. It will be limited to women's writing in English, but it will include work by writers born elsewhere-such as Buchi Emecheta, Doris Lessing, Jean Rhys, Grace Nicholls, Sylvia Plath, Christina Stead-who have lived and written in the United Kingdom. Within the contours of this framework the volumes will pose leading questions about the shifting terms of nationality and culture, the relationship between centre and periphery, as well as the manifest difference of class, ethnicity, religion, race and region, within Britain in any given period. The question of what gendered authorship itself might mean in different periods will also be addressed in the framing rationale for the series, and in individual volumes.
Our aim is to make the series a key resource for specialist and non-specialist scholars and students alike. It primary audience will be scholars and postgraduates, but at the same time it is designed to be useful and accessible to ambitious upper level undergraduates.
We welcome all ideas for new books and have provided guidelines for
submitting proposals in the Authors
section of our website. To discuss project ideas and proposals for this
series please contact the series editors:
Professor Cora Kaplan: c.l.kaplan@qmul.ac.uk
Dr Jennie Batchelor: jeb29@kent.ac.uk
More information
If you would like further information regarding these titles or any other related text please contact us.
To find out about other literature texts, please browse our catalogue.
