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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 Haywood, whose political and journalistic texts have up until now received little scholarly consideration. By analyzing a wide range of materials produced between the 1690s to the 1750s, Pollock exposes a literary marketplace characterized less by cool rational discourse and genial consensus than by vehement contestation and struggles for cultural authority, particularly in debates concerning the proper extent of women's participation in English public life. Utilizing innovative methods of research and analysis the book reveals that even at its moment of inception, there was an immanent critique of the early liberal public sphere being articulated by women writers who were keenly aware of the hierarchies and techniques of exclusion that contradicted their culture's oft-repeated appeals to the principles of equality and universality.
List of contents
Acknowledgments. Introduction. Part I: Models and Countermodels of English Public Discourse, 1690-1714. 1. Learned Oracles, Muck-Spattered Spies, and Academic Activists: The Politics of English Publicness from Dunton to Addison. 2. Neutering Addison and Steele: Aesthetic Failure and the Spectatorial Public Sphere. 3. Gender, Ridicule, and the Satire of Liberal Reform: ‘Manley,’ Mandeville and the Female Tatler. Part II: Tory Feminism and the Gendered Reader, Astell to Haywood. 4. Astell, Whig Publicness, and the Problem of Female Specularity. 5. Voyeurism, Feminist Impartiality, and Cultural Authority: Haywood and the Addisonian Periodical. Notes. Bibliography. Index.
About the author
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.
Summary
Gender and the Fictions of the Public Sphere, 1690-1755, complicates our understanding of eighteenth-century English print culture by studying the journalistic work of women writers who have long been overlooked by scholars, and by re-interpreting texts by canonical male authors in the period as responses to these early feminist models of cultural authority.
