Frederick M. Keener – författare

A major task confronting today's scholars is the reclamation from near oblivion of a multitude of works of art, literature, music, scholarship, and other creative enterprises by eighteenth-century women. This fascinating collection provides a multifaceted approach to understanding the roles played by women as both creators of and subjects within works of art in the eighteenth century.A series of initial essays examines the biographical and historical conditions in which women of the times lived and worked. Some essays explore the attitudes of women themselves and how they perceived their roles, as well as their expectations expressed by male authors. Other essays focus on women's contributions to particular arts, notably poetry, the novel, music, and painting. A final section attends to research itself, reporting first on collaborative efforts to identify individual eighteenth-century women authors and discover trends in their writing. In addition, an alternative to the traditional scholarly methods course is provided in an example of the original research directed toward the rediscovery and understanding of the texts of Elizabeth Griffeth. This entertaining collection will foster new appreciation for the presence of women in the arts of the eighteenth century. An important contribution to women's studies, this volume is sure to be of special interest to students and scholars alike.

Implication, Readers' Resources, and Thomas Gray's Pindaric Odes presents an account of “the Poets’ Secret,” the quite belated, historically recent, discovery by scholars and critics of something many poets have recognized and employed for ages: the sense expressed by allusively parallel parts within a text—thus expressed intratextually rather than only intertextually.Inferential perception of the implicit sense produced logically and linguistically—by enthymemes, implicatures, and other intratextual features, as well as intertextual ones—can be indispensable for readers’ comprehension of literary as well as other texts, especially their difficult passages. Implication, Readers' Resources, and Thomas Gray's Pindaric Odes addresses these elusive matters as they have historically been posed by Thomas Gray’s Pindaric odes of 1757, and mainly the first of them, “The Progress of Poesy,” a poem that readers have more or less knowledgeably struggled to understand from the outset. The process of disclosing that ode’s sense can be aided by new further reference to Paradise Lost, in the context of Gray’s largely unpublished Commonplace Book, with its extensive, little-studied, and very pertinent use of Plato and Locke.