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The fin de siècle not only designated the end of the Victorian epoch but also marked a significant turn towards modernism. Extraordinary Aesthetes critically examines literary and visual artists from England, Ireland, and Scotland whose careers in poetry, fiction, and illustration flourished during the concluding years of the nineteenth century. This collection draws special attention to the exceptional contributions that artists, poets, and novelists made to the cultural world of the late 1880s and 1890s. The essays illuminate a range of established, increasingly acknowledged, and lesser-known figures whose contributions to this brief but remarkably intense cultural period warrant close attention. Such figures include the critically neglected Mabel Dearmer, whose stunning illustrations appear in Evelyn Sharp’s radical fairy tales for children. Equally noteworthy is the uncompromising short fiction of Ella D’Arcy, who played a pivotal role in editing the most famous journal of the 1890s, The Yellow Book . The discussion extends to a range of legendary writers, including Max Beerbohm, Oscar Wilde, and W.B. Yeats, whose works are placed in dialogue with authors who gained prominence during this period. Bringing women’s writing to the fore, Extraordinary Aesthetes rebalances the achievements of artists and writers during the rapidly transforming cultural world of the fin de siècle.

As mass media burgeoned in the years between the first and second world wars, so did another phenomenon-celebrity. Beginning in Hollywood with the studio-orchestrated transformation of uncredited actors into brand-name stars, celebrity also spread to writers, whose personal appearances and private lives came to fascinate readers as much as their work.Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture between the Warsprofiles seven American, Canadian, and British women writers-Dorothy Parker, Anita Loos, Mae West, L. M. Montgomery, Margaret Kennedy, Stella Gibbons, and E. M. Delafield-who achieved literary celebrity in the 1920s and 1930s and whose work remains popular even today. Faye Hammill investigates how the fame and commercial success of these writers-as well as their gender-affected the literary reception of their work. She explores how women writers sought to fashion their own celebrity images through various kinds of public performance and how the media appropriated these writers for particular cultural discourses. She also reassesses the relationship between celebrity culture and literary culture, demonstrating how the commercial success of these writers caused literary elites to denigrate their writing as \"middlebrow,\" despite the fact that their work often challenged middle-class ideals of marriage, home, and family and complicated class categories and lines of social discrimination. The first comparative study of North American and British literary celebrity,Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture between the Warsoffers a nuanced appreciation of the middlebrow in relation to modernism and popular culture.

Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain 1970–2010: Body, Time and Locale presents the history and current state of a critically neglected, significant body of contemporary writing and places it within the wider social and political contexts of the period. Ranging from Geraldine Monk’s ventriloquizing of the Pendle witches to Denise Riley’s fiercely self-critical lyric poems, from the multi-media experiments of Maggie O’Sullivan to the globally aware, politicised sequences of Andrea Brady and Jennifer Cooke, David Kennedy and Christine Kennedy theorise women’s alternative poetries in terms of Julia Kristeva’s idea of ‘women’s time’ and in terms of the female poetic voice constantly negotiating with dominant systems of representation. They also offer a much-needed re-theorising of the value of avant garde practices.

This anthology brings together extensive selections of poetry by the five most prolific and prominent women poets of the English Civil War period: Anne Bradstreet, Hester Pulter, Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips and Lucy Hutchinson. It presents these poems in modern-spelling, clear-text versions for classroom use, and for ready comparison to mainstream editions of male poets’ work. The anthology reveals the diversity of women’s poetry in the mid-seventeenth century, across political affiliations and forms of publication. Notes on the poems and an introduction explain the contexts of Civil War, religious conflict, and scientific and literary development. The anthology enables a more comprehensive understanding of seventeenth-century women’s poetic culture, both in its own right and in relation to prominent male poets such as Marvell, Milton and Dryden.

In The Embodied Word: Female Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and English Religious Cultures, 1350-1700 , Nancy Bradley Warren expands on the topic of female spirituality, first explored in her book Women of God and Arms , to encompass broad issues of religion, gender, and historical periodization. Through her analyses of the variety of ways in which medieval spirituality was deliberately and actively carried forward to the early modern period, Warren underscores both continuities and revisions that challenge conventional distinctions between medieval and early modern culture. The early modern writings of Julian of Norwich are an illustrative starting point for Warren's challenge to established views of English religious cultures. In a single chapter, Warren follows the textual and devotional practices of Julian as they influence two English Benedictine nuns in exile, and then Grace Mildmay, a seventeenth-century Protestant gentry woman, \"to shed light on the ways in which individual encounters of the divine, especially gendered bodily encounters expressed textually, signify for others both personally and socio-historically.\" In subsequent chapters, Warren discusses St. Birgitta of Sweden's Imitatio Christi in the context of the importance of Spain and Spanish women in shaping a distinctive form of early modern Englishness strongly aligned with medieval religious culture; juxtaposes the fifteenth-century mystic Margery Kempe with the life and writings of Anna Trapnel, a seventeenth-century Baptist; and treats Catherine of Siena together with the Protestant Anne Askew and Lollard and Recusant women. In the final chapters she focuses on the interplay of gender and textuality in women's textual representations of themselves and in works written by men who used the traditions of female spirituality in the service of competing orthodoxies.

1790 saw the publication of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France – the definitive tract of modern conservatism as a political philosophy. Though women of the period wrote texts that clearly responded to and reacted against Burke’s conception of English history and to the contemporary political events that continued to shape it, this conversation was largely ignored or dismissed, and much of it remains to be reconsidered today. Examining the works of women writers from Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft to the Strickland sisters and Mary Anne Everett Green, this book begins to recuperate that conversation and in doing so uncovers a more complete and nuanced picture of women’s participation in the writing of history. Professor Mary Spongberg puts forward an alternate, feminized historiography of Britain that demonstrates how women writers’ recourse to history caused them to become generically innovative and allowed them to participate in the political debates that framed the emergence of modern British historiography, and to push back against the Whig interpretation of history that predominated from 1790-1860.

In Women Writing on the French Riviera Rosemary Lancaster examines the varied literary and artistic works of nine women visitors and their unique contributions to the cultural identity of the Riviera in its seminal rise to fame.

This book examines late nineteenth-century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, marking the crucial role of technology in social and literary struggles for equality. The New Woman, the fin de siècle cultural archetype of early feminism, became the focal figure for key nineteenth-century debates concerning issues such as gender and sexuality, evolution and degeneration, science, empire and modernity. While the New Woman is located in the debates concerning the ‘crisis in gender’ or ‘sexual anarchy’ of the time, the period also saw an upsurge of new technologies of communication, transport and medicine. As this monograph demonstrates, literature of the time is inevitably caught up in this technological modernity: technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle, and medical technologies, through literary texts come to work as freedom machines, as harbingers of female emancipation.

Featuring the most frequently taught female writers and texts of the early modern period, this Companion introduces the reader to the range, complexity, historical importance, and aesthetic merit of women's writing in Britain from 1500–1700. Presenting key textual, historical, and methodological information, the volume exemplifies new and diverse approaches to the study of women's writing. The book is clearly divided into three sections, covering: how women learnt to write and how their work was circulated or published; how and what women wrote in the places and spaces in which they lived, worked, and worshipped; and the different kinds of writing women produced, from poetry and fiction to letters, diaries, and political prose. This structure makes the volume readily adaptable to course usage. The Companion is enhanced by an introduction that lays out crucial framework and critical issues, and by chronologies that situate women's writings alongside political and cultural events.

For South Asians, food regularly plays a role in how issues of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and national identity are imagined as well as how notions of belonging are affirmed or resisted.Culinary Fictionsprovides food for thought as it considers the metaphors literature, film, and TV shows use to describe Indians abroad. When an immigrant mother in Jhumpa Lahiri'sThe Namesakecombines Rice Krispies, Planters peanuts, onions, salt, lemon juice, and green chili peppers to create a dish similar to one found on Calcutta sidewalks, it evokes not only the character's Americanization, but also her nostalgia for India. Food, Anita Mannur writes, is a central part of the cultural imagination of diasporic populations, andCulinary Fictionsmaps how it figures in various expressive forms. Mannur examines the cultural production from the Anglo-American reaches of the South Asian diaspora. Using texts from novels-Chitra Divakaruni'sMistress of Spicesand Shani Mootoo'sCereus Blooms at Night-and cookbooks such as Madhur Jaffrey'sInvitation to Indian Cookingand Padma Lakshmi'sEasy Exotic, she illustrates how national identities are consolidated in culinary terms.