From rumps and stays to muffs and handkerchiefs, underwear and accessories were critical components of the 18th-century woman's wardrobe. They not only created her shape, but expressed her character, sociability, fashionability, and even political allegiances. These so-called ephemeral flights of fashion were not peripheral and supplementary, but highly charged artefacts, acting as cultural currency in contemporary society. The Modern Venus highlights the significance of these elements of a woman's wardrobe in 1770s and 1780s Britain and the Atlantic World, and shows how they played their part in transforming fashionable dress when this was expanding to new heights and volumes. Dissecting the female silhouette into regions of the body and types of dress and shifting away from a broad-sweeping stylistic evolution, this book explores these potent players within the woman's armoury. Marrying material, archival and visual approaches to dress history, and drawing on a rich range of sources – including painted portraiture, satirical prints, diaries, memoirs – The Modern Venus unpacks dress as a medium and mediator in women's lives. It demonstrates the importance of these overlooked garments in defining not just a woman's silhouette, but also her social and cultural situation, and thereby shapes our understanding of late 18th-century life. With over 125 color images, The Modern Venus is a remarkable resource for scholars, students and costume lovers alike.

Until fairly recently, critical studies and anthologies of African American literature generally began with the 1830s and 1840s. Yet there was an active and lively transatlantic black literary tradition as early as the 1760s. Genius in Bondage situates this literature in its own historical terms, rather than treating it as a sort of prologue to later African American writings. The contributors address the shifting meanings of race and gender during this period, explore how black identity was cultivated within a capitalist economy, discuss the impact of Christian religion and the Enlightenment on definitions of freedom and liberty, and identify ways in which black literature both engaged with and rebelled against Anglo-American culture.

A novel, which addresses central themes of adultery, obsession and inheritance. It follows the fortunes of Matilda Melbourne who displays virtue, delicacy and an unwavering commitment to the sometimes ruthless demands of parental authority.

The conversation parties of the bluestockings, held to debate contemporary ideas in eighteenth-century Britain, were vital in encouraging female artistic achievement. The bluestockings promoted links between learning and virtue in the public imagination, inventing a new kind of informal sociability that combined the life of the senses with that of the mind. This collection of essays, by leading scholars in the fields of literature, history and art history, provides an interdisciplinary treatment of bluestocking culture in eighteenth-century Britain. It is the first academic volume to concentrate on the rich visual and material culture that surrounded and supported the bluestocking project, from formal portraits and sculptures to commercially reproduced prints. By the early twentieth century, the term 'bluestocking' came to signify a dull and dowdy intellectual woman, but the original bluestockings inhabited a world in which brilliance was valued at every level and women were encouraged to shine and even dazzle.

"Strathallan (1816) is at once a conventional and subversive romance. Alicia LeFanu is informed by the work of earlier eighteenth-century society satirists such as Frances Brooke and Frances Burney, yet at the same time her interests coincide with those of her more immediate contemporaries Scott and Austen. The novel addresses several themes of adultery, obsession and inheritance. It follows the fortunes of Matilda Melbourne who displays virtue, delicacy, and an unwavering commitment to the sometimes ruthless demands of parental authority." "LeFanu's implicit referencing of Frances Sheridan's examination of similar obligations in Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761) places the novel in the context of serious ongoing debates on female education and marriage. Matilda's friend and confidant, Arbella Ferrars, subverts the expectations of such an idealized femininity and is the principle means through which the sardonic and often wickedly wry observations on provincial pretensions are expressed. For Arbella's disruptive brand of coquetry. LeFanu is indebted to Frances Brooke's History of Lady Julia Mandeville and History of Emily Montegue. Notwithstanding the particular merits of this work, its intertextual relation to both earlier fictions and prevalent trends presents an intriguing basis upon which to examine the extent of the women writer's strategic engagement with the literary market."--BOOK JACKET.