Paula R. Backscheider – författare

Although Eliza Haywood was one of the best known and most prolific writers in her own time, there is no modern edition of her works. This edition provides representative texts from Haywood's entire career, which overlaps that of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Tobias Smollett. The six fictions and two plays provided here illustrate the many kinds of writing Haywood produced, the ways she treated important themes and issues, and the contributions she made to the development of the English novel.

Although Eliza Haywood was one of the best known and most prolific writers in her own time, there is no modern edition of her works. This edition provides representative texts from Haywood's entire career, which overlaps that of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Tobias Smollett. The six fictions and two plays provided here illustrate the many kinds of writing Haywood produced, the ways she treated important themes and issues, and the contributions she made to the development of the English novel.

Popular Fiction by Women 1660-1730 gathers together for the first time a representative selection of shorter fiction by the most successful women writers of the period, from Aphra Behn, the first important English female professional writer, to Penelope Aubin and Eliza Haywood, who with Daniel Defoe dominated prose fiction in the 1720s. The texts included were amongst the best-selling titles of their time, and played a key role in the expanding market for narrative in the early eighteenth century. Crucial to the development of the longer novel of manners and morals that emerged in the mid-eighteenth century, these novellas have been neglected by literary historians, but now - with the impetus of feminist criticism - they have been re-established as an essential chapter in the history of the novel in English and are widely studied. Though strikingly varied in narrative format and purpose, ranging as they do from the errotic and sensational to the sentimental and pious, they offer a distinct fictional approach to the moral and social issues of the age from a female standpoint. Not only are these novels still a good read for those who enjoy fiction, but they are also essential to the understanding of the hostory of the English novel. The anthology raises a number of questions for readers and scholars alike: do these fictions constitute a counter-tradition or a rival and competing set of narrative choices to the male novel of the mid-eighteenth century? The diveristy of these stories, their affinities with the mainstream in some cases and their clear divergence from it in others, illuminates the very complexity of the issue. Yet, whatever the answer the reader settles on and whatever critical perspective one brings to reading this fiction, one thing is clear: fiction by women is an important part of the literary history of the eighteenth century.

A Companion to the Eighteenth-century Novel furnishes readers with a sophisticated vision of the eighteenth-century novel in its political, aesthetic, and moral contexts. * An up-to-date resource for the study of the eighteenth-century novel * Furnishes readers with a sophisticated vision of the eighteenth-century novel in its political, aesthetic, and moral context * Foregrounds those topics of most historical and political relevance to the twenty-first century * Explores formative influences on the eighteenth-century novel, its engagement with the major issues and philosophies of the period, and its lasting legacy * Covers both traditional themes, such as narrative authority and print culture, and cutting-edge topics, such as globalization, nationhood, technology, and science * Considers both canonical and non-canonical literature

The public and private spheres are conceived to be separate and complementary, useful in understanding human experience and social phenomena, gendered and perhaps "natural". Taking the usefulness of this model as a focus, these essays ask how the spheres interpenetrate.

Throughout one of English history's most tumultuous periods, Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) took part in and reported on nearly every major political, religious, and social controversy. This widely acclaimed biography offers a fascinating account of Defoe's remarkable life. Paula Backscheider reveals new information about Defoe's secret career as a double agent, his daring business ventures, his dangerous pen-and his cat-and-mouse games with those who sought to control it. This is the definitive biography of one of eighteenth-century England's most influential figures-and one of the most prolific and widely read authors of all time

Revising Women is a collection of essays by a distinguished group of feminist critics. Each essay is a contribution to the history of the English novel, to our understanding of literature's place in cultural debate, and to women's studies. The essays give steady attention to the ways novels participate in social processes and the ways women perceived the public sphere and stubbornly attempted to participate in it. Rich contextualization and adept use of theory reveal both the individual writer's story and the story beneath the text that is a cultural production with the potential to reveal why we and our society are as we are. Each essay develops ways of using history in relation to literature, takes up large historical events and issues, and interprets in fine detail what individuals do with them. Beginning with the fictions of the late seventeenth century, and ending with Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen, the essays in Revising Women are characterized by informed historicizing, detailed textual explication, sophisticated feminist theory, and dedicated attention to the interrelationships between life and literary works and between everyday existence and political processes.

This large-scale project aims to present a broad, original perspective on the writing and lives of eighteenth century (British) women poets. More specifically, it seeks to do so by giving close attention to the intersections of agency-as evident in the distinct ways in which women made use of poetry in their lives-and genre. Like some other recent scholars, Paula Backscheider here construes the latter term to include categories based on popular contemporary ideas of poems and their purposes, defined sometimes more by form and sometimes more by subject matter. She focuses in particular on the commonalities and differences, both of which she often finds revealing, between the functions of individual genres for men and for women. The roughly forty poets she considers are meant to constitute a diverse but not systematic or exhaustively comprehensive selection.

This major study offers a broad view of the writing and careers of eighteenth-century women poets, casting new light on the ways in which poetry was read and enjoyed, on changing poetic tastes in British culture, and on the development of many major poetic genres and traditions. Rather than presenting a chronological survey, Paula R. Backscheider explores the forms in which women wrote and the uses to which they put those forms. Considering more than forty women in relation to canonical male writers of the same era, she concludes that women wrote in all of the genres that men did but often adapted, revised, and even created new poetic kinds from traditional forms. Backscheider demonstrates that knowledge of these women's poetry is necessary for an accurate and nuanced literary history.Within chapters on important canonical and popular verse forms, she gives particular attention to such topics as women's use of religious poetry to express candid ideas about patriarchy and rape; the continuing evolution and important role of the supposedly antiquarian genre of the friendship poetry; same-sex desire in elegy by women as well as by men; and the status of Charlotte Smith as a key figure of the long eighteenth century, not only as a Romantic-era poet.

This anthology gathers 368 poems by 80 British women poets of the long eighteenth century. Few of these poems have been reprinted since originally published, and all are crucial to understanding fully the literary history of women writers. Paula R. Backscheider and Catherine E. Ingrassia demonstrate the enormous diversity of poetry produced during this time by organizing the poems in three broad and deliberately overlapping categories: by genre, establishing that women wrote in all of the forms that men did with equal mastery and creativity; by theme, offering a revisionary look at the range of topics these writers addressed, including war, ecology, friendship, religion, and the stages of life; and by the poems' more specific focus on the women's experiences as writers. Backscheider and Ingrassia have selected poems that represent the best work of skilled poets, creating a wonderful mix of canonical and little-known pieces. They include the complete texts of longer poems that are abridged or omitted in other collections.Their substantial part introductions, textual notes, bibliographical information, and biographical sketches situate the poets and their writings within the cultural and political milieu in which they appeared. To generate further scholarship on this subject, this essential anthology puts primary texts in front of students, scholars, and general readers. It fills the persistent need to document women's poetic expression during the long eighteenth century and to rewrite the literary history of the period, a history from which women have largely been excluded.

This anthology gathers 368 poems by 80 British women poets of the long eighteenth century. Few of these poems have been reprinted since originally published, and all are crucial to understanding fully the literary history of women writers. Paula R. Backscheider and Catherine E. Ingrassia demonstrate the enormous diversity of poetry produced during this time by organizing the poems in three broad and deliberately overlapping categories: by genre, establishing that women wrote in all of the forms that men did with equal mastery and creativity; by theme, offering a revisionary look at the range of topics these writers addressed, including war, ecology, friendship, religion, and the stages of life; and by the poems' more specific focus on the women's experiences as writers. Backscheider and Ingrassia have selected poems that represent the best work of skilled poets, creating a wonderful mix of canonical and little-known pieces. They include the complete texts of longer poems that are abridged or omitted in other collections.Their substantial part introductions, textual notes, bibliographical information, and biographical sketches situate the poets and their writings within the cultural and political milieu in which they appeared. To generate further scholarship on this subject, this essential anthology puts primary texts in front of students, scholars, and general readers. It fills the persistent need to document women's poetic expression during the long eighteenth century and to rewrite the literary history of the period, a history from which women have largely been excluded.

Frances Brooke (1724-1789), journalist, translator, playwright, novelist, and even co-manager of a theater, was described as "perhaps the first female novel-writer who attained a perfect purity and polish of style." Today, Brooke is known primarily for The History of Emily Montague, one of the earliest novels about Canada, where she lived for a number of years. But it is her third novel, The Excursion, that is an important example of the fashionable and popular English novels of the late 1770s.Written for the very audience it portrays, this novel introduces the heroine, Maria Villiers, to London's "gentle" society and its glittering pastimes. Brooke drew upon the English courtship novel in the tradition of Eliza Haywood, Henry Fielding, and Frances Burney for her novel's overarching plot structure. But instead of concentrating on Maria's romantic adventures, she experiments with unusual treatments of subplots and unconventional characters.The most interesting aspect of her story is the development of Maria's ambition to win fame and fortune as a writer; it is one of the few portraits of a woman with literary ambitions by an early woman writer. Brooke's wry narrative voice foreshadows that of Jane Austen.The editors' introduction places The Excursion firmly in the tradition of the English novel, provides a fresh biography of Brooke, and brings together the most important eighteenth- and twentieth-century criticism of Brooke's work.The second volume in the series Eighteenth-Century Novels by Women, The Excursion contributes to our understanding of the development of the novel and offers a lively view of women's position in eighteenth-century English society.

In this book, Paula Backscheider considers Daniel Defoe's entire canon as related, developing, and in close dynamic relationship to the literature of its time. In so doing, she revises our conception of the contexts of Defoe's work and reassesses his achievement and contribution as a writer.By restoring a literary context for modern criticism, Backscheider argues the intensity and integrity of Defoe's artistic ambitions, demonstrating that everything he wrote rests solidly upon extensive reading of books published in England, his understanding of the reading tastes of his contemporaries, and his engagement with the issues and events of his time. Defoe, the dedicated professional writer and innovator, emerges with a new wholeness, and certain of his novels assume new significance.Defoe's literary status continues to be debated and misunderstood. Even critical studies of the novel often begin with Richardson rather than Defoe. By moving from Defoe's poetry, pamphlets, and histories to the novels, Backscheider offers an argument for the thematic and stylistic coherency of his oeuvre and for a recognition of the dominant place he held in shaping the English novel. For example, Defoe deserves to be recognized as the true originator of the historical novel, for three of his fictions are deeply engaged with just those conceptual and technical issues common to all later historical fiction. And Roxana now appears as Defoe's deliberate attempt to enter the fastest growing market for fiction -- that for women readers.What have been powerfully significant for the history of the novel, then, are the very characteristics of his writing that have been held against his literary stature: its contemporaneity, its mixed and untidy form, its formal realism, its concentration on the life of an individual, and its probing of the individual's psychological interaction with the empirical world, making that world representative even as it is referential. It is exactly these characteristics most original, prominent, and subsequently imitated in Defoe's fiction that define the form we call "novel."

The public and private spheres are conceived to be separate and complementary, useful in understanding human experience and social phenomena, gendered and perhaps "natural". Taking the usefulness of this model as a focus, these essays ask how the spheres interpenetrate.

A Companion to the Eighteenth-century Novel furnishes readers with a sophisticated vision of the eighteenth-century novel in its political, aesthetic, and moral contexts. An up-to-date resource for the study of the eighteenth-century novel Furnishes readers with a sophisticated vision of the eighteenth-century novel in its political, aesthetic, and moral context Foregrounds those topics of most historical and political relevance to the twenty-first century Explores formative influences on the eighteenth-century novel, its engagement with the major issues and philosophies of the period, and its lasting legacy Covers both traditional themes, such as narrative authority and print culture, and cutting-edge topics, such as globalization, nationhood, technology, and science Considers both canonical and non-canonical literature

A Companion to the Eighteenth-century Novel furnishes readers with a sophisticated vision of the eighteenth-century novel in its political, aesthetic, and moral contexts. An up-to-date resource for the study of the eighteenth-century novel Furnishes readers with a sophisticated vision of the eighteenth-century novel in its political, aesthetic, and moral context Foregrounds those topics of most historical and political relevance to the twenty-first century Explores formative influences on the eighteenth-century novel, its engagement with the major issues and philosophies of the period, and its lasting legacy Covers both traditional themes, such as narrative authority and print culture, and cutting-edge topics, such as globalization, nationhood, technology, and science Considers both canonical and non-canonical literature

"Elizabeth Singer Rowe and the Development of the English Novel" is the first in-depth study of Rowe's prose fiction. A four-volume collection of her work was a bestseller for a hundred years after its publication, but today Rowe is a largely unrecognized figure in the history of the novel. Although her poetry was appreciated by poets such as Alexander Pope for its metrical craftsmanship, beauty, and imagery, by the time of her death in 1737 she was better known for her fiction. According to Paula R. Backscheider, Rowe's major focus in her novels was on creating characters who were seeking a harmonious, contented life, often in the face of considerable social pressure. This quest would become the plotline in a large number of works in the second half of the eighteenth century, and it continues to be a major theme today in novels by women. Backscheider relates Rowe's work to popular fiction written by earlier writers as well as by her contemporaries. Rowe had a lasting influence on major movements, including the politeness (or gentility) movement, the reading revolution, and the Bluestocking society.The author reveals new information about each of these movements, and Elizabeth Singer Rowe emerges as an important innovator. Her influence resulted in new types of novel writing, philosophies, and lifestyles for women. Backscheider looks to archival materials, literary analysis, biographical evidence, and a configuration of cultural and feminist theories to prove her groundbreaking argument.

A revelatory history of the characters that playwrights and managers created out of the real lives of women in intimate relationships with military men to serve Great Britain's greatest needs during the war-saturated eighteenth century.During the long eighteenth century, Great Britain was almost continuously at war. As the era unfolded, the theatre gradually discovered the potential in having actresses, recently introduced to the stage in the 1660s, perform as wartime women characters. As playwrights and managers began casting women in transformative roles to meet each major national need, female characters came to be central figures in bringing the war home to the nation, transforming them into deeply patriotic British subjects.Paula Backscheider's Women in Wartime is the first study of theatrical representations of women with intimate connections to military men. Drawing upon her extensive expertise in gender, performance studies, popular culture, and archival studies, Backscheider traces the rise of the London theatre's acceptance that one of its responsibilities was to support its country's wars. Rather than focusing on the historical, mythical "warrior women" on the battlefield who have been much studied, Backscheider explores the lives and work of sweethearts, wives, mothers, sisters, barmaids, provision sellers, seaport prostitutes, and more, whose relationships to active-duty men made them recruits, volunteers, or even conscripts. They represent a distinct group of thousands of real women, and the actresses who portrayed them gave performances of change, struggle, celebration, mourning, survival, love, and patriotism. Backscheider explicates more than fifty plays—from main pieces, short farces, interludes, afterpieces, and comic operas to entr'actes, pantomimes, and even masques—as both entertainment and as ideological and propagandistic vehicles in times of severe crises. She also reveals how these works, many written by men with military experience, attest to the context of difficult, inescapable realities and momentous needs. Through the debunking of sexual stereotypes and attention to audience-pleasing roles such as impoverished-wife and breeches parts, Backscheider adds a dimension to theatrical history that substantially contributes to women's and military histories. Women in Wartime demonstrates the startling acuity and prescience of the repertoire in responding to the war-steeped culture of the period.