Women's Literary Networks and Media Cultures in the Long Eighteenth Century

"This smartly edited and curated collection prompts new conversations on gender, materiality, and media history. Arguments covering sermon events, annotated catalogues, and manuscript verse miscellanies challenge binaries like print and manuscript, moving the critical conversation forward while also deftly contextualizing foundational narratives. This volume shows how far we have come in gender and media studies and provides new scaffolding for the decades ahead." - Kate Ozment, author of The Hroswitha Club and the Impact of Women Book Collectors

"These essays display imagination and tact as they scrutinize previously overlooked or disparaged archival sources to reconstruct women's contributions to eighteenth-century print, manuscript, and oral cultures. They show that the feminist project of historical recovery begun decades ago is far from complete, and that its future is in good hands." - Tom Mole, author of The Secret Life of Books: Why They Mean More Than Words

"Wide-ranging and deeply researched, Women's Literary Networks and Media Cultures in the Long Eighteenth Century offers a bold rethinking of women's participation in literary culture across print, manuscript, and oral media. Moving from The Lady's Magazine, Methodist women's sermons, and manuscript miscellanies to annotated catalogues, borrowing records, publishers' correspondence, and archives in Britain, Ireland, Scotland, and Canada, the collection reveals a vibrant world of circulation, collaboration, and cultural reinvention. Its essays challenge assumptions about authorship, genre, and literary value by recovering women not only as writers, but as printers, publishers, readers, collectors, annotators, preachers, and other makers of texts and networks. Drawing on bibliography, close reading, digital humanities, and quantitative analysis, the volume shows how marginal traces and fragmentary archives can yield new models for literary history. One of its strengths is its attention to archival process itself: messy notebooks, anonymous traces, dispersed documents, and incomplete records here become evidence of rich histories of reading, publishing, sociability, and cultural labor. The authors find excitement where earlier scholarship often saw absence, showing how women's media practices shaped the 'flowing stream of textual life.' Combining archival rigor with energy and methodological invention, this collection opens fresh pathways for scholars and students of eighteenth-century literature, book history, media studies, and women's literary history." - Paula McDowell, author of The Invention of the Oral: Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices in Eighteenth-Century Britain

"This volume moves studies of gendered text culture forward in fruitful ways. The women discussed transcend simple categorization, showing up as wives, caregivers, editors, scholars, connoisseurs, library patrons, printers, preachers, and witnesses to war. It shows these women negotiating issues as lofty as literary taste, as practical as fair compensation, and as grounded as printing techniques." - Lisa Maruca, author of The Work of Print: Authorship and the English Text Trades, 1660-1760