1st Edition

Gender and the Fictions of the Public Sphere, 1690-1755

By Anthony Pollock Copyright 2009
240 Pages
by Routledge

240 Pages
by Routledge

240 Pages
by Routledge

Challenging the longstanding interpretation of the early English public sphere as polite, inclusive, and egalitarian this book   re-interprets key texts by representative male authors from the period—Addison, Steele, Shaftesbury, and Richardson—as reactionary responses to the widely-consumed and surprisingly subversive work of women writers such as Mary Astell, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza... Read more

Chapter One, "Learned Oracles, Muck-Spattered Spies, and Academic Activists: The Politics of English Publicness, 1690-1714"; Chapter Two, "Neutering Addison and Steele: Aesthetic Failure and the Spectatorial Public Sphere"; Chapter Three, "Gender, Ridicule, and the Satire of Liberal Reform: ‘Manley,’ Mandeville and the Female Tatler"; Chapter Four, "Astell, Whig Publicness, and the Problem of Female Specularity"; Chapter Five, "Richardson, Anti-Pamelism, and the Promise of Female Discursivity"; Chapter Six, "Voyeurism, Feminist Impartiality, and Cultural Authority: Haywood and the Addisonian Periodical."

Biography

Anthony Pollock is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he specializes in eighteenth-century European literature and gender studies. A former Mellon Fellow at the Newberry Library, Pollock’s work has been placed in many journals, including ELH, Philological Quarterly, and The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation.