Reading women : literacy, authorship, and culture in the Atlantic world, 1500-1800 / edited by Heidi Brayman Hackel and Catherine E. Kelly.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Brayman Hackel, Heidi.

Kelly, Catherine E.

Series:

Material texts.

Material texts

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Women--Books and reading--Great Britain--History.

Women.

Women--Books and reading--United States--History.

Women and literature--Great Britain--History.

Women and literature.

Women and literature--United States--History.

Literacy--History.

Literacy.

Books and reading--History.

Books and reading.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (280 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, c2008.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In 1500, as many as 99 out of 100 English women may have been illiterate, and girls of all social backgrounds were the objects of purposeful efforts to restrict their access to full literacy. Three centuries later, more than half of all English and Anglo-American women could read, and the female reader was emerging as a cultural ideal and a market force. While scholars have written extensively about women's reading in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and about women's writing in the early modern period, they have not attended sufficiently to the critical transformation that took place as female readers and their reading assumed significant cultural and economic power.Reading Women brings into conversation the latest scholarship by early modernists and early Americanists on the role of gender in the production and consumption of texts during this expansion of female readership. Drawing together historians and literary scholars, the essays share a concern with local specificity and material culture. Removing women from the historically inaccurate frame of exclusively solitary, silent reading, the authors collectively return their subjects to the activities that so often coincided with reading: shopping, sewing, talking, writing, performing, and collecting. With chapters on samplers, storytelling, testimony, and translation, the volume expands notions of reading and literacy, and it insists upon a rich and varied narrative that crosses disciplinary boundaries and national borders.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Illustrations

Introduction / Hackel, Heidi Brayman / Kelly, Catherine E.

Part I. Pleasures and Prohibitions

Introduction

Chapter 1. Inventing the Early Modern Woman Reader through the World of Goods: Lyly's Gentlewoman Reader and Katherine Stubbes / Lamb, Mary Ellen

Chapter 2. Engendering the Female Reader: Women's Recreational Reading of Shakespeare in Early Modern England / Roberts, Sasha

Chapter 3. Crafting Subjectivities: Women, Reading, and Self-Imagining / Kelley, Mary

Part II. Practices and Accomplishment

Chapter 4. ''you sow, Ile read'': Letters and Literacies in Early Modern Samplers / Calabresi, Bianca F.-C.

Chapter 5. The Female World of Classical Reading in Eighteenth-Century America / Winterer, Caroline

Chapter 6. Reading and the Problem of Accomplishment / Kelly, Catherine E.

Part III. Translation and Authorship

Chapter 7. ''Who Painted the Lion?'' Women and Novelle / Moulton, Ian Frederick

Chapter 8. The Word Made Flesh: Reading Women and the Bible / Knight, Janice

Chapter 9. ''With All Due Reverence and Respect to the Word of God'': Aphra Behn as Skeptical Reader of the Bible and Critical Translator of Fontenelle / Ferguson, Margaret

Chapter 10. Female Curiosities: The Transatlantic Female Commonplace Book / Stabile, Susan M.

Part IV. Afterword

Chapter 11. Reading Outside the Frame / Gross, Robert A.

Notes on Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781283897792

1283897792

9780812205985

0812205987

OCLC:

794702276