British Women Satirists in the Long Eighteenth Century

by Amanda Hiner (Editor), Elizabeth Tasker Davis (Editor)

Overview

This collection of innovative essays by leading scholars on eighteenth-century British women satirists showcases women's contributions to the satiric tradition and challenges the assumption that women were largely targets, rather than practitioners, of satire during the long eighteenth century. The essays examine women's satires across diverse genres, from the fable to the periodical, and attend to women writers' appropriation of a literary style and form often viewed as exclusively masculine. The introduction features a new theory of women's satire and proposes a framework for analyzing satiric techniques employed by women writers. Organized chronologically, the contributors' essays address a wide range of authors and explore the ways in which satiric writings by women engaged in contemporary cultural conversations, influencing assumptions about gender, sociability, politics, and literary practices. This inclusive yet tightly-focused collection formulates an innovative and provocative new feminist theory of satire.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781108940559
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	07/10/2025
Pages:	317
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 8.98(h) x 0.79(d)

About the Author

Amanda Hiner is Professor of English at Winthrop University, South Carolina. She publishes articles on eighteenth-century women writers, satire, and print culture, and edited the special topics issue of Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies entitled 'New Approaches to Eliza Haywood: The Political Biography and Beyond.' She is also a nationally recognized expert, researcher, and consultant in critical thinking.

Elizabeth Tasker Davis is Professor of English at Stephen F. Austin State University, Texas. She specializes in eighteenth-century British literature and is a past president of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition. Her publications include Wit, Virtue, and Emotion: British Women's Enlightenment Rhetoric (2021) and articles on eighteenth-century women writers and actresses.

Table of Contents

Introduction Amanda Hiner and Elizabeth Tasker Davis; Part I. Traditions and Breaks: 1. Women Writers and Juvenal: 'singing plain truths' Paul Baines; 2. Unlocking the Dressing Room: Mary Evelyn's Mundus Muliebris Melinda Alliker Rabb; 3. Aphra Behn and Traditions of Satire Tanya Caldwell; 4. Delarivier Manley: Satire as Conversation Rachel Carnell; 5. The Pleasures of Satire in the Fables of Anne Finch Sharon Smith; Part II. Publicity and Print Culture: Women Satirists during the Mid-Eighteenth Century: 6. Women's Satires of the Literary Marketplace in Eighteenth-Century England Catherine Ingrassia; 7. Charlotte Lennox, Satirical Poetry, and the Rise of Participatory Democracy Susan Carlile; 8. Jane Collier's Satirical Fable: Teeth, Claws, and Moral Authority in An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting Martha F. Bowden; 9. Hiding in Plain Sight: Frances Burney as Satiric Novelist Marilyn Francus; Part III. Moral Debates and Satiric Dialogue: Women Satirists and Eighteenth-Century Sociability: 10. Anne Finch, Anna Seward, and Women's Relation to Formal Verse Satire in the Long Eighteenth Century Claudia Thomas Kairoff; 11. Satire as Gossip: Lady Anne Hamilton's The Epics of the Ton Michael Edson; 12. 'An invisible spy': Mary Robinson's Sylphid and the Image of the Satirist Rayna Rosenova; 13. Austen's Menippean Experiments: Paternalism and Empire in the Juvenilia and Mansfield Park Danielle Spratt.

Editorial Reviews

‘This book, thanks to the intellectual rigor of its essays and the generosity of its scholarly apparatus, merits a long and healthy shelf life.' Katherine G. Charles, Eighteenth-Century Fiction

‘Anthologies of satire have noticeably ignored women satirists; much of the satire in their poetic, dramatic, and fictional works has been overlooked, dismissed, or ignored. This important collection of essays on women satirists is a major step toward correcting this glaring oversight.’ Vivian Zuluaga Papp, The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cat

‘This collection of thirteen essays offers a thought-provoking and enjoyable read, one that builds productively on recent major studies of eighteenth-century satire to argue that women writers played an innovative and productive role in it literary development. The individual essays, like satire itself, are always in dialogue, each contributor circling us backward and forward to recurrent ideas and acknowledging expanding trajectories. There is a true cohesion among the essays, and they function as a useful whole. Hiner and Tasker Davis should be commended for overseeing and fostering this careful and hugely valuable work that achieves its core mission of offering a theoretical and contextual framework for ongoing research.’ Claudine van Hensbergen, Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal

‘… the editors of this collection deserve warm praise for the 'Selected List of Eighteenth-Century Women Writers and their Satiric Works' which they append to the volume, and for the excellent 'Selected Bibliography and Guide to Further Reading', both of which should facilitate ground-breaking research in the future. The quality of the essays gathered in the volume is also striking.’ The Year's Work in English Studies

From the Publisher