Elizabeth Singer Rowe played a pivotal role in the development of the novel during the eighteenth century. Winner of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of the Choice ACRL Elizabeth Singer Rowe and the Development of the English Novel is the first in-depth study of Rowe’s prose fiction. A four-volume collection of her work was a bestseller for a hundred years after its publication, but today Rowe is a largely unrecognized figure in the history of the novel. Although her poetry was appreciated by poets such as Alexander Pope for its metrical craftsmanship, beauty, and imagery, by the time of her death in 1737 she was better known for her fiction. According to Paula R. Backscheider, Rowe's major focus in her novels was on creating characters who were seeking a harmonious, contented life, often in the face of considerable social pressure. This quest would become the plotline in a large number of works in the second half of the eighteenth century, and it continues to be a major theme today in novels by women. Backscheider relates Rowe’s work to popular fiction written by earlier writers as well as by her contemporaries. Rowe had a lasting influence on major movements, including the politeness (or gentility) movement, the reading revolution, and the Bluestocking society. The author reveals new information about each of these movements, and Elizabeth Singer Rowe emerges as an important innovator. Her influence resulted in new types of novel writing, philosophies, and lifestyles for women. Backscheider looks to archival materials, literary analysis, biographical evidence, and a configuration of cultural and feminist theories to prove her groundbreaking argument.

Intelligent Souls? offers a new understanding of Islam in eighteenth-century Britain. Cahill explores two overlapping strands of thinking about women and Islam, which produce the phenomenon of “feminist orientalism.” One strand describes seventeenth-century ideas about the nature of the soul used to denigrate religio-political opponents. A second tracks the transference of these ideas to Islam during the Glorious Revolution and the Trinitarian controversy of the 1690s. The confluence of these discourses compounded if not wholly produced the stereotype that Islam denied women intelligent souls. Surprisingly, women writers of the period accepted the stereotype, but used it for their own purposes. Rowe, Carter, Lennox, More, and Wollstonecraft, Cahill argues, established common ground with men by leveraging the “otherness” identified with Islam to dispute British culture’s assumption that British women were lacking in intelligence, selfhood, or professional abilities. When Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman she accepted that view as true—and “feminist orientalism” was born, introducing a fallacy about Islam to the West that persists to this day. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

This volume provides a new context for women’s writing from the seventeenth through the end of the nineteenth century, highlighting the significant role of the parsonage and the parson himself for women’s education in those centuries. Cindy K. Renker and Susanne Bach's collection of essays is the first of its kind on the education, lives, and works of highly accomplished daughters of Protestant clergymen. Since this volume only represents a limited number of women raised and educated in parsonages, it will surely encourage more investigation of other women writers, translators, educators, etc. with similar backgrounds. Moreover, since this book takes a comparative and transnational approach by focusing on different regions of Europe and different centuries. This collection of essays is thus aimed at scholars in multiple fields such as British literature, German studies, gender studies, the history of women’s education, and social and cultural history.

In Poetic Sisters, Deborah Kennedy explores the personal and literary connections among five early eighteenth-century women poets: Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea; Elizabeth Singer Rowe; Frances Seymour, Countess of Hertford; Sarah Dixon; and Mary Jones. Richly illustrated and elegantly written, this book brings the eighteenth century to life, presenting a diverse range of material from serious religious poems to amusing verses on domestic life. The work of Anne Finch, author of "A Nocturnal Reverie," provides the cornerstone for this well informed study. But it was Elizabeth Rowe who achieved international fame for her popular religious writings. Both women influenced the Countess of Hertford, who wrote about the beauty of nature, centuries before modern Earth Day celebrations. Sarah Dixon, a middle-class writer from Kent, had a strong moral outlook and stood up for those whose voices needed to be heard, including her own. Finally, Mary Jones, who lived in Oxford, was praised for both her genius and her sense of humor. Poetic Sisters presents a fascinating female literary network, revealing the bonds of a shared vocation that unites these writers. It also traces their literary afterlife from the eighteenth century to the present day, with references to contemporary culture, demonstrating how their work resonates with new generations of readers.

In 1740, Benjamin Franklin published the first American edition of Gospel Sonnets, by the eminent Scottish Presbyterian minister Ralph Erskine. The work, already in its fifth British edition, quickly became an American bestseller and remained so throughout the eighteenth century. Franklin was aware of what most scholars of American religion and literature have forgotten -that poetry played a central role in the "surprising works of God" that birthed evangelicalism. The far-reaching social transformations precipitated by the transatlantic evangelical revivals of the eighteenth century depended upon the development of a major literary form, that of revival poetry. Literary scholars and historians of religion have prioritized sermons, conversion narratives, periodicals, and hymnody. Wendy Roberts here argues that poetry offered a unique capacity to "diffuse celestial Fervor through the World," in the words of the cleric Samuel Davies. Awakening Verse is the first monograph to address this large corpus of evangelical poetry in the American colonies, shedding light on important dimensions of eighteenth-century religious and literary culture. Roberts deftly assembles a large, previously unknown archive of immensely popular poems, examines how literary history has rendered this poetic tradition invisible, and demonstrates how a vibrant popular poetics exercised a substantial effect on the landscape of early American religion, literature, and culture.

This book offers a revisionist account of poetry and embodiment from Milton to Romanticism. Scholars have made much of the period's theories of matter, with some studies equating the eighteenth century's modernity with its materialism. Yet the Enlightenment in Britain also brought bold new arguments for the immateriality of spirit and evocative claims about an imminent spirit realm. Protestant religious writing was of two minds about futurity, swinging back and forth between patience for the resurrected body and desire for the released soul. This ancient pattern carried over, the book argues, into understandings of poetry as a modern devotional practice. A range of authors agreed that poems can provide a foretaste of the afterlife, but they disagreed about what kind of future state the imagination should seek. The mortalist impulse—exemplified by John Milton and by Romantic poets Anna Letitia Barbauld and William Wordsworth—is to overcome the temptation of disembodiment and to restore spirit to its rightful home in matter. The spiritualist impulse—driving eighteenth-century verse by Mark Akenside, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, and Edward Young—is to break out of bodily repetition and enjoy the detached soul's freedom in advance. Although the study isolates these two tendencies, each needed the other as a source in the Enlightenment, and their productive opposition didn't end with Romanticism. The final chapter identifies an alternative Romantic vision that keeps open the possibility of a disembodied poetics, and the introduction considers present-day Anglophone writers who put it into practice.

"Historicizes British women's relationships with other women through the medium of commemorative writing over the course of the long eighteenth century. Featuring archival discoveries, the contributions in this volume trace female networks, friendships, rivalries, and competition and uncover the material record of women's honor"--