Focusing on eighteenth-century constructions of symbolic femininity and eighteenth-century women's writing in relation to contemporary utopian discourse, this volume adjusts our understanding of the utopia of the Enlightenment, placing a unique emphasis on colonial utopias. These essays reflect on issues related to specific configurations of utopias and utopianism by considering in detail English and French texts by both women (Sarah Scott, Sarah Fielding, Isabelle de Charrière) and men (Paltock and Montesquieu). The contributors ask the following questions: In the influential discourses of eighteenth-century utopian writing, is there a place for 'woman,' and if so, what (or where) is it? How do 'women' disrupt, confirm, or ground the utopian projects within which these constructs occur? By posing questions about the inscription of gender in the context of eighteenth-century utopian writing, the contributors shed new light on the eighteenth-century legacies that continue to shape contemporary views of social and political progress.

The first full-length study of women's utopian spatial imagination in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this book explores the sophisticated correlation between identity and social space. The investigation is driven by conceptual questions and thus seeks to link theoretical debates about space, gender and utopianism to historiographic debates about the (gendered) social production of space. Specific attention is given to spaces that feature widely in contemporary utopian imagination: Arcadia, the palace, the convent, the harem and the country house.

The volume investigates the ‘voice’ of women writers in the development of literary studies, and interrogates how scholars read and teach women’s literary texts. These issues are still crucial for women’s and gender studies today and deserve to be properly investigated and constantly updated. The various essays collected here examine how, and to what extent, ‘women’, across time and space, experimented with new genres or forms of expression in order to transform, question, resist or paradoxically consolidate gender discriminations and dominant ideologies: patriarchy, colonialism, slavery and racism, imperialism, religion, and (hetero)sexuality. Women’s Voices and Genealogies in Literary Studies in English is addressed to MA and PhD students in women’s and gender studies, and to all those students or young scholars who are interested in gender methodologies as a mode of practice in literary criticism and analysis. The authors of the volume share a long-standing experience in women’s and gender studies and in teaching English women’s literature, literary criticism and feminist methodologies and theories to students from different national origins.

"This collection speaks to common themes and strategies in women's writing about their different worlds, from Margaret Cavendish's seventeenth-century Blazing World of the North Pole to the "men-less" islands of the French writer Scudery to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century utopias of Shelley and Gaskell, and science fiction pulps, finishing with the more contemporary feminist fictions of Le Guin, Wittig, Piercy, and Mitchison. It shows that these fictions historically speak to each other and together amount to a literary tradition of women's writing about a better place."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

At the time of its publication, a woman's sexual desire was thought to be muted, even nonexistent. Sexual pursuits of any kind were thought to be a man's game, left for a woman to indulge or deny. The novel and its author so obviously challenges the standing ideas of what desire looks like and who it can come from. The main protagonist disguises herself as four different women in her efforts to understand how a man may interact with each individual persona. She is intrigued by the men at the theater and the attention they pay to the prostitutes there, decides to pretend being a prostitute herself. Disguised, she especially enjoys talking with Beauplaisir, whom she has encountered before, though previously constrained by her social status's formalities. He, not recognizing her, and believing her favors to be for sale, asks to meet her. She demurs and puts him off until the next evening.... The story explores a variety of themes, almost none of which come without literary dispute and controversy. The protagonist's game of disguise touches on everything from gender roles, to identity, to sexual desire.

This study contributes to the understanding of Owenism and why it failed. It corrects many of the earlier misconceptions and errors of fact about New Harmony, Indiana, and the seven other Owenite communities founded in 1826 and 1827.

This thesis tests whether the theory that estrangement allows reconceptions of gender politics holds in the liminal and secondary worlds of Margaret Cavendish, a writer deeply, if ambivalently, committed to Fancy. Her work is often subversive, but withdraws when the social order is threatened. In order to assess whether Cavendish's gender politics change in her secondary worlds, her primary-world work must first be examined. Here, Cavendish is contradictory on female nature, education, public authority, speech, cross-dressing, and marriage, reflecting her multiple and divided concept of subjectivity. She always remains committed to female chastity and obedience, however, and to social order. Relationships between women are also consistently problematic in her primary-world work. This does not completely change in her liminal worlds. The feminocentric imaginative worlds or new societies of 'The Convent of Pleasure, Lady Contemplation', and 'The Female Academy', all become unstable, only surviving if they carefully negotiate with the primary world. In 'Blazing World', the Empress reforms its misogynist religion and government, but change threatens this utopia's stability, and the Empress apparently withdraws her reforms. The 'Blazing World' finally becomes an ambivalent text on female rule and nature, despite the discursive and educational spaces created for women and the celebration of female friendship. In contrast, the more stable world of "Assaulted and Pursued Chastity" does not fundamentally attempt to challenge gender politics, although the text radically realigns gender and genre, destabilizes sex and gender (if only in terms of the protagonist), and women finally become good rulers. If subversiveness is kept within careful bounds, recuperation becomes unnecessary. Aemelia Lanyer, Rachel Speght, and Anne Bradstreet also experiment with the opportunities available for women in fantasy, but the primary world often destroys these liminal and secondary worlds, showing a feminine vulnerability to Fortune. In contrast, the pragmatic Aphra Behn dismisses secondary worlds. Reflecting the ephemerality of feminine fancy, Cavendish's secondary and liminal worlds only occasionally depart from the contradictions inherent in her gender politics in the primary world.

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