This book documents and analyzes an aspect of social change in England -- the opening of higher education to women. Because college education for women developed in the second half of the nineteenth century, the opening of higher education to women has been viewed as an 'unexpected revolution'. This book challenges such all assumption, by indicating that the education of women had been the subject of debate and serious discussion at least since the Renaissance, and it illustrates how print culture brought the debate into the public domain and contributed to the eventual opening of higher education to women. The publications examined in this study indicate that formal higher education for women had been anticipated by a significant number of seventeenth-, eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers whose works are here contextualised for the first time. While the focus of this study has been on printed sources, attention has also been paid to the personal papers of individuaLs who directly influenced the eventual opening of university education to women, and who illustrated that the success of the struggle for women's education was due to the ability of a few individuals to realise ambitions which had been held for generations.

Unlike its British forebears, the early American magazine, or periodical miscellany, functioned in culture as a forum driven by manifold contributions and perpetuated by reader response. Arising in colonial Philadelphia, America's more democratic magazine sustained a range of conflicting ideas, norms, and beliefs—indeed, it promoted their very exchange. It invited and embraced competing voices, particularly during the first 75 years of the Republic. In this first-ever account of the early American magazine as a distinct form, Amy Beth Aronson reveals how such participatory dynamics and public visibility offered special advantages to women, especially to those with sufficient education, access, and financial means, for whom ladies magazines offered unusual opportunities for self-expression, collective discussion, and cultural response. Moreover, the genre opened and sustained dialogue among contributors, whose competing voices played off each other, provoking rebuttal and revision by subsequent contributors and noncontributing readers. This free play of discourse positioned women's words in a uniquely productive way, offering a kind of community of women readers who, together, wrote and revised magazine content and collectively negotiated and authorized new language for a new public's use.

The eighteenth century saw the birth of the concept of literature as business: literature critiqued and promoted capitalism, and books themselves became highly marketable canonical objects. During this period, misogynous representations of women often served to advance capitalist desires and to redirect feelings of antagonism toward the emerging capitalist order. Misogynous Economies proposes that oppression of women may not have been the primary goal of these misogynistic depictions. Using psychoanalytic concepts developed by Julia Kristeva, Mandell argues that passionate feelings about the alienating socioeconomic changes brought on by capitalism were displaced onto representations that inspired hatred of women and disgust with the female body. Such displacements also played a role in canon formation. The accepted literary canon resulted not simply from choices made by eighteenth-century critics but also, as Mandell argues, from editorial and production practices designed to stimulate readers' desires to identify with male poets. Mandell considers a range of authors, from Dryden and Pope to Anna Letitia Barbauld, throughout the eighteenth century. She also reconsiders Augustan satire, offering a radically new view that its misogyny is an attempt to resist the commodification of literature. Mandell shows how misogyny was put to use in public discourse by a culture confronting modernization and resisting alienation.

Inquiring into the formation of a literary canon during the Restoration and the eighteenth century, Barbara Benedict poses the question, "Do anthologies reflect or shape contemporary literary taste?" She finds that there was a cultural dialectic at work: miscellanies and anthologies transmitted particular tastes while in turn being influenced by the larger culture they helped to create. Benedict reveals how anthologies of the time often created a consensus of literary and aesthetic values by providing a bridge between the tastes of authors, editors, printers, booksellers, and readers. Making the Modern Reader, the first full treatment of the early modern anthology, is in part a history of the London printing trade as well as of the professionalization of criticism. Benedict thoroughly documents the historical redefinition of the reader: once a member of a communal literary culture, the reader became private and introspective, morally and culturally shaped by choices in reading. She argues that eighteenth-century collections promised the reader that culture could be acquired through the absorption of literary values. This process of cultural education appealed to a middle class seeking to become discriminating consumers of art. By addressing this neglected genre, Benedict contributes a new perspective on the tension between popular and high culture, between the common reader and the elite. This book will interest scholars working in cultural studies and those studying noncanonical texts as well as eighteenth-century literature in general. Originally published in 1996. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.