The history of British women's writing

"Volume 1 focuses on women's literary history in Britain between 700 and 1500. It brings to the fore a wide range of women's literary activity undertaken in Latin, Welsh and Anglo-Norman alongside that of the English vernacular, demanding a rethinking of the traditions of literary history, and ultimately the concept of 'writing' itself. Rethinking the history of women's writing and literary history itself, this volume 2 examines the diversity of early women's writing (from verse and songs to household records and recipes), offering a new paradigm for understanding women's shaping roles in the literary, religious, and political movements of the sixteenth century. During the seventeenth century, in response to political and social upheavals such as the English Civil Wars, women produced writings in both manuscript and print. This volume 3 represents recent scholarship that has uncovered new texts as well as introduced new paradigms to further our understanding of women's literary history during this period. This volume 4 charts the most significant changes for a literary history of women in a period that saw the beginnings of a discourse of 'enlightened feminism'. It reveals that women engaged in forms old and new, seeking to shape and transform the culture of letters rather than simply reflect or respond to the work of their male contemporaries. This period witnessed the first full flowering of women's writing in Britain. This illuminating volume 5 features leading scholars who draw upon the last 25 years of scholarship and textual recovery to demonstrate the literary and cultural significance of women in the period, discussing writers such as Austen, Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley."--Pub. desc. Volume 7: "The ranks of English women writers rose steeply in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, contributing to the era's revolutionary social movements as well as to transforming literary genres in prose and poetry. The phenomena of 'the new' -- 'New Women', 'New Unionism', 'New Imperialism', 'New Ethics', 'New Critics', 'New Journalism', 'New Man' -- are this moment's touchstones. This book tracks the period's new social phenomena and unfolds its distinctively modern modes of writing. It provides expert introductions amid new insights into women's writing throughout the United Kingdom and around the globe."--Publisher's website.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction, Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.