This critical edition of Lennox's novel uses as its copy-text the first, and only known, edition of Harriot Stuart. The notes to the edition try to clarify the text for the modern reader by identifying people, places, and events, and commenting upon the ways in which aspects of the novel reflect or reject mid-eighteenth century social and literary prose.

Linking the decline in Church authority in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries with the increasing respectability of fiction, Carol Stewart provides a new perspective on the rise of the novel. The resulting readings of novels by authors such as Samuel Richardson, Sarah Fielding, Frances Sheridan, Charlotte Lennox, Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne, William Godwin, and Jane Austen trace the translation of ethical debate into secular and gendered terms. Stewart argues that the seventeenth-century debate about ethics that divided Latitudinarians and Calvinists found its way into novels of the eighteenth century. Her book explores the growing belief that novels could do the work of moral reform more effectively than the Anglican Church, with attention to related developments, including the promulgation of Anglican ethics in novels as a response to challenges to Anglican practice and authority. An increasingly legitimate genre, she argues, offered a forum both for investigating the situation of women and challenging patriarchal authority, and for challenging the dominant political ideology.

"While most of the letter writers are unknown, four achieved prominence - the author Charlotte Lennox, the Reverend Thomas Winstanley, the navigator Charles Clerke, and the bluestocking Susannah Dobson. This book presents new perspectives on Lennox's and Winstanley's domestic lives, Clerke's ambiguous encounters with indigenous peoples, and Dobson's mysterious sexuality." "This book will appeal to eighteenth-century scholars as well as to scholars in women's and cultural studies. It will also be of interest to postcolonial, queer, and other literary theorists."--BOOK JACKET.

A scholarly review of American world literature from early times to the postmodernist era American World Literature: An Introduction explores how the subject of American Literature has evolved from a national into a global phenomenon. As the author, Paul Giles – a noted expert on the topic – explains, today American Literature is understood as engaging with the wider world rather than merely with local or national circumstances. The book offers an examination of these changing conceptions of representation in both a critical and an historical context. The author examines how the perception of American culture has changed significantly over time and how this has been an object of widespread social and political debate. From examples of early American literature to postmodernism, the book charts ways in which the academic subject areas of American Literature and World Literature have converged – and diverged – over the past generations. Written for students of American literature at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels and in all areas of historical specialization, American World Literature offers an authoritative guide to global phenomena of American World literature and how this subject has undergone crucial changes in perception over the past thirty years.

This critical edition of Lennox's novel uses as its copy-text the first, and only known, edition of Harriot Stuart. The notes to the edition try to clarify the text for the modern reader by identifying people, places, and events, and commenting upon the ways in which aspects of the novel reflect or reject mid-eighteenth century social and literary prose.

This reference work brings together biographies of over 1000 notable British women from Boudicca to Barbara Castle, offering an engaging record of female achievement spanning 2000 years of British life.

This volume compiles and annotates for the first time the complete correspondence of the eighteenth-century British author Charlotte Lennox, best known for her novel The Female Quixote. Lennox corresponded with famous contemporaries from different walks of life such as James Boswell, David Garrick, Samuel Johnson, and Sir Joshua Reynolds, and she interacted with many other influential figures including her patroness the Countess of Bute, publisher Andrew Millar, and the Reverend Thomas Winstanley. In addition to Lennox’s and her correspondents’ letters, this book presents related documents such as the author’s proposals for subscription editions of her works, her file with the Royal Literary Fund, and a series of poems and stories supposedly composed by her son but perhaps written by herself. In these carefully and extensively annotated documents, Charlotte Lennox traces the vagaries in the career of a female writer in the male-dominated eighteenth-century literary marketplace. The introduction situates Lennox in the context of contemporaneous print culture and specifically examines the contentious question of the authorship of The Female Quixote, Lennox’s experimentation with various forms of publication, and her appeals for charity to the Royal Literary Fund when she was impoverished towards the end of her life. The author who emerges from Charlotte Lennox was an active, assertive, innovative, and independent woman trying to find her place—and make a literary career—in eighteenth-century Britain. Thus, this volume makes an important contribution to the history of female authorship, literary history, and eighteenth-century studies.