Women Writing Fancy
Authorship and Autonomy from 1611 to 1812
Authors: Smyth, Maura
- 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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- About this book
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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.
- About the authors
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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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Bibliographic Information
- Bibliographic Information
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- Book Title
- Women Writing Fancy
- Book Subtitle
- Authorship and Autonomy from 1611 to 1812
- Authors
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- Maura Smyth
- Copyright
- 2017
- Publisher
- Palgrave Macmillan
- Copyright Holder
- The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s)
- eBook ISBN
- 978-3-319-49427-2
- DOI
- 10.1007/978-3-319-49427-2
- Hardcover ISBN
- 978-3-319-49426-5
- Edition Number
- 1
- Number of Pages
- X, 295
- Topics
