| This course will look at women writers' contributions to the literary culture of the long eighteenth century. Women were central in the development of the popular new genre of the novel. They embraced the tradition of advice literature and wrote conduct books and essays. They participated in the canonical tradition, and were active in the various spheres of literary culture throughout the period. They were also at the centre, as subjects and as participants, of a long-standing argument about the fitness and propriety of women writing. This course will examine women writers not as part of a separate, parallel tradition, but as integral to a fuller understanding of the complexity of post-Restoration and eighteenth-century literary culture. |
