Refashioning motherless women

The Ways of Fiction
New Essays on the Literary Cultures of the Eighteenth Century
Editor(s): Nicholas J. Crowe
ISBN-13: 978-1-5275-0828-6
Cambridge Scholar Publishers

The essays gathered here capture fresh perspectives on the literary environments of the eighteenth century. The core concern of this volume is culture – the ways in which it shapes literature and is in turn influenced by it: the “ways” of fiction. Especially commissioned from experts in the field, essays cover the whole of the century, embracing such themes as class, gender, nationhood, politics, and identity.
Through scrutiny of familiar and less well-known authors alike, the collection forms a stimulating and provocative anthology. It will naturally appeal to scholars and students of the novel, as well as to historians of culture, and all those concerned with eighteenth-century studies. A broader readership will also find much here to enhance their appreciation of fiction as a cultural artefact. Responding to a growing fascination with this period in British history, these essays open vital new perspectives on the novel at a key moment in its development.

Includes: Charlotte Brontë refashions Rasselas by Amy Watkin.

Essential Essays
Culture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry
Adrienne Rich (Author), Sandra M. Gilbert (Editor, University of California, Davis)
W.W. Norton, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-65236-9

A career-spanning selection of the lucid, courageous, and boldly political prose of National Book Award winner Adrienne Rich.
Adrienne Rich was an award-winning poet, influential essayist, radical feminist, and major intellectual voice of her generation. Essential Essays gathers twenty-five of her most renowned essays into one volume, demonstrating the lasting brilliance of her voice, her prophetic vision, and her revolutionary views on social justice. Rich’s essays unite the political, personal, and poetical like no other.
Essential Essays is edited and includes an introduction by leading feminist scholar, literary critic, and poet Sandra M. Gilbert. Emphasizing Rich’s lifelong intellectual engagement, the essays selected here range from the 1960s to 2008. The volume contains one of Rich’s earliest essays,“When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” which discusses the need for female self-definition, along with excerpts from her ambitious, ground-breaking Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. As the New York Times wrote, Rich “brought the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse,” as evidenced in her 1980 essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.”

Includes:  Temptations of a motherless woman: Jane Eyre.