As Women’s History Month comes to a close, consider these recent titles as you continue to read and celebrate stories about and written by women!
Women and Music in the Age of Austen
Edited by Linda Zionkowski with Miriam F. Hart
This interdisciplinary collection of essays from musicology, literary studies, and gender studies challenges the conventional historical categories that marginalize women’s experience from Austen’s time, highlighting the central role women played in musical performance, composition, reception, and representation, and analyzes its lasting effect on Georgian culture.
Teaching the Eighteenth Century Now: Pedagogy as Ethical Engagement
Edited by Kate Parker and Miriam L. Wallace
In this timely collection, teacher-scholars of “the long eighteenth century,” a Eurocentric time frame from about 1680 to 1832, consider what teaching means in this historical moment: one of attacks on education, a global contagion, and a reckoning with centuries of trauma experienced by Black, Indigenous, and immigrant peoples.
Alimentary Orientalism: Britain’s Literary Imagination and the Edible East
By Yin Yuan
What, exactly, did tea, sugar, and opium mean in 18th- and 19th-century Britain? Alimentary Orientalism reassesses the politics of Orientalist representation by examining the contentious debates surrounding these exotic, recently popularized, and literally consumable things. Tracing exotic ingestion as a motif across a range of authors and genres, this book considers how, why, and whither writers used scenes of eating, drinking, and smoking to diagnose and interrogate their own solipsistic constructions of the Orient.
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Reading Smell in Eighteenth-Century Fiction
By Emily C. Friedman
By highlighting scents and their shifting meanings across the period—bodies, tobacco, smelling-bottles, and sulfur—Reading Smell not only provides new insights into canonical works by authors like Swift, Smollett, Richardson, Burney, Austen, and Lewis, but also sheds new light on the history of the British novel as a whole.
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Designing Women: The Dressing Room in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Culture
By Tita Chico
Designing Women argues that the dressing room becomes a powerful metaphor in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature. While satirists attack the lady’s dressing room as a site of individual and social degradation, domestic novelists celebrate it as a space for moral, social, and personal amelioration.