This anthology gathers 368 poems by 80 British women poets of the long eighteenth century. Few of these poems have been reprinted since originally published, and all are crucial to understanding fully the literary history of women writers.

Paula R. Backscheider and Catherine E. Ingrassia demonstrate the enormous diversity of poetry produced during this time by organizing the poems in three broad and deliberately overlapping categories: by genre, establishing that women wrote in all of the forms that men did with equal mastery and creativity; by theme, offering a revisionary look at the range of topics these writers addressed, including war, ecology, friendship, religion, and the stages of life; and by the poems' more specific focus on the women's experiences as writers.

Backscheider and Ingrassia have selected poems that represent the best work of skilled poets, creating a wonderful mix of canonical and little-known pieces. They include the complete texts of longer poems that are abridged or omitted in other collections. Their substantial part introductions, textual notes, bibliographical information, and biographical sketches situate the poets and their writings within the cultural and political milieu in which they appeared.

To generate further scholarship on this subject, this essential anthology puts primary texts in front of students, scholars, and general readers. It fills the persistent need to document women's poetic expression during the long eighteenth century and to rewrite the literary history of the period, a history from which women have largely been excluded.

This anthology gathers 368 poems by 80 British women poets of the long eighteenth century. Few of these poems have been reprinted since originally published, and all are crucial to understanding fully the literary history of women writers.

Paula R. Backscheider and Catherine E. Ingrassia demonstrate the enormous diversity of poetry produced during this time by organizing the poems in three broad and deliberately overlapping categories: by genre, establishing that women wrote in all of the forms that men did with equal mastery and creativity; by theme, offering a revisionary look at the range of topics these writers addressed, including war, ecology, friendship, religion, and the stages of life; and by the poems' more specific focus on the women's experiences as writers.

Backscheider and Ingrassia have selected poems that represent the best work of skilled poets, creating a wonderful mix of canonical and little-known pieces. They include the complete texts of longer poems that are abridged or omitted in other collections. Their substantial part introductions, textual notes, bibliographical information, and biographical sketches situate the poets and their writings within the cultural and political milieu in which they appeared.

To generate further scholarship on this subject, this essential anthology puts primary texts in front of students, scholars, and general readers. It fills the persistent need to document women's poetic expression during the long eighteenth century and to rewrite the literary history of the period, a history from which women have largely been excluded.

Drawing on unusual archival materials, addressing a variety of nonliterary or extratextual sources, employing new theoretical approaches, and offering innovative discussions of established works, the essays gathered in the latest volume of "Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture" reflect the most exciting new directions of research within the field.

The novel is a dominant focus, and the contributors to this volume offer new perspectives on the genre itself or bold new readings of such canonical texts as "Les Liaisons dangereuses," "Cecilia," "Histoire de M. Cleveland," and the early fiction of Daniel Defoe, as well as Casanova's novelistic autobiography, "Histoire de ma vie." Some essays use unusual or little-known sources or materials: --the early English novel, "The Jamaica Lady"; an anonymous British seaman's journal; and "infant's petitions," the letters that accompanied babies left at foundling hospitals. Other essays examine the complicated constructions of identity and authorship that emerge in various disciplines and genres: depictions of statuary in eighteenth-century French painting and literature; representations of the French literary marketplace; the role of singing in the poetry of Stephen Duck; the presence of ancient Stoic and Baconian principles in Samuel Johnson's moral writing; and the complicated correspondence between Horace Walpole and William Cole. The volume concludes with a special section of essays meditating on the complex eighteenth-century discourse on beauty and aesthetics.

Contributors: Jeffrey Barnouw, Barbara Benedict, Melissa Downes, Ted Emery, Timothy Erwin, Susan Greenfield, George Haggerty, Adam Komisaruk, Laurence Mall, James Mullholland, Alexander Pitosfsky, David Porter, Neil Saccamano, Laura Schattschneider, April Shelford, Peter Sonderen, Geoffrey Turnovsky, Caroline Weber