Broadview literary texts

"Robert Bage's Hermsprong satirizes English society of the 1790s targeting, in particular, corrupt clergymen, grasping lawyers and wicked aristocrats. The protagonist, a European raised among Native Americans, visits Europe and is dismayed by what he encounters. While such satire might seem conventional enough, Hermsprong is distinguished from other political novels of the period by its comedy, and it is a measure of Bage's success that he won the admiration of writers as different in political outlook as Mary Wollstonecraft and Sir Walter Scott. Indeed, Hermsprong is built around debate, and celebrates the pleasures of the lively exchange of ideas.". "This Broadview Literary Texts edition contains extensive primary source appendices including material by William Godwin, Benjamin Franklin, Pierre de Charlevoix, and Voltaire."--BOOK JACKET.

Mary Astell's A Serious Proposal to the Ladies is one of the most important and neglected works advocating the establishment of women's academies. Its reception was so controversial that Astell responded with a lengthy sequel, also in this volume. The cause of great notoriety, Astell's Proposal was imitated by Defoe in his "An Academy for Women," parodied in the Tatler, satirized on the stage, plagiarized by Bishop Berkeley, and later mocked by Gilbert and Sullivan in Princess Ida. (Publisher description, 2002 edition. From amazon.com page.)

A Home for the Highland Cattle is the wry comedy of a young English woman newly settled in an African city who, from the most enlightened of motives, departs from the generally accepted way of dealing with native servants. In the The Antheap, set in the gold fields of the former Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Tommy, the son of a white mine manager, has a tumultuous relationship with Dirk, the "half-caste" son of the mine owner.

"Published together for the first time, Eliza Haywood's Anti-Pamela and Henry Fielding's An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews are the two most important responses to Samuel Richardson's novel Pamela. Anti-Pamela comments on Richardson's representations of work, virtue, and gender, while also questioning the generic expectations of the novel that Pamela establishes, and it provides a vivid portrayal of the material realities of life for a woman in eighteenth-century London. Fielding's Shamela punctures both the figure Richardson established for himself as an author and Pamela's preoccupation with virtue." "This Broadview edition also includes a rich selection of historical materials, including writings from the period on sexuality, women's work, Pamela and the print trade, and education and conduct."--BOOK JACKET.

"This collection of early works by Eliza Haywood includes the well-known novella Fantomina (1725) along with three other short, highly engaging Haywood works: The Tea-Table (1725), Reflections on the Various Effects of Love (1726), and Love-Letters on All Occasions (1730). In these writings, Haywood arouses the vicarious experience of erotic love while exploring the ethical and social issues evoked by sexual passion." "This Broadview edition includes an introduction that focuses on Haywood's life and career and on the status of prose fiction in the early eighteenth century. Also included are appendices of contextual materials from the period comprising writings by Haywood on female conduct, eighteenth-century pornography (from Venus in the Cloister), and a source text (Nahum Tate's A Present for the Ladies)."--BOOK JACKET.

"Written during the English Civil War and Interregnum when the public theatres were closed and Margaret Cavendish was living away from England in exile, Bell in Campo and The Sociable Companions are scathing satires that speak to the role of women's agency amidst this cultural tumult. In Bell in Campo, a group of virtuous women follow their husbands to war and, refusing to remain docilely out of harm's way, form an army of their own. The Sociable Companions details the struggles of four women from impoverished Royalist families trying to survive in a rapacious marriage market at the war's end." "The Broadview Literary Texts edition presents these two complementary plays together, along with supplementary materials on Cavendish's life, the participation of women in the combat of the English Civil War, the conduct of the Royalist military forces, and seventeenth-century social and marriage conventions."--BOOK JACKET.

'The Rebel of the Family' (1880) is the first New Woman novel by Eliza Lynn Linton. Perdita Winstanley, the novel's protagonist, struggles to balance the competing demands on her snobbish, conservative mother and sisters, her radical friends in the women's rights movement, and an admirable but low-born chemist and his family. [This book] also includes what is perhaps the first literary portrait of the late-Victorian lesbian community in London, featuring Bell Blount and her 'little wife' Connie.

"Frances Burney's journals and letters, composed between 1768 and 1839, contain a unique account of the creative, social, and commercial ambitions and achievements of an eighteenth-century woman writer. Focusing on Burney's literary life, this selection from her journals and correspondence combines Burney's own accounts of the creation of her popular novels, her aspirations for her dramatic writings, and her reflections upon her letters and journals as literary productions in their own right."--BOOK JACKET.

" ... Haywood's first novel, Love in Excess [is] ... a well-crafted novel in which the claims of love and ambition are pursued through multiple storylines until the heroine engineers a melodramatic conclusion."--Back cover.

"This edition assembles the major essays on race and imperialism written by Nancy Cunard in the 1930s and 1940s. As a British expatriate living in France, and as a politically engaged poet, editor, publisher, and journalist, Nancy Cunard devoted much of her energy to the cause of racial justice.". "This Broadview edition contextualizes Cunard's writings on race in terms of the relations among modernism, gender, and empire. It includes a range of contemporaneous documents that place her essays in dialogue with other European writers and with the work of writers and intellectuals of the African diaspora."--BOOK JACKET.

"Mary Robinson's A Letter to the Women of England (1799) is a radical response to the rampant anti-feminist sentiment of the late 1790s. In this work, Robinson urges her female contemporaries to throw off the "glittering shackles" of custom and to claim their rightful places as the social and intellectual equals of men." "Separately published in the same year, Robinson's novel The Natural Daughter follows the story of Martha Morley, who defies her husband's authority, adopts a found infant, is barred from her husband's estate and is driven to seek work as an actress and author. The novel implicitly links and critiques domestic tyrants in England and Jacobin tyrants in France." "This edition also includes: other writings by Mary Robinson (tributes, and an excerpt from The Progress of Liberty); writings by contemporaries on women, society, and revolution; and contemporary reviews of both works."--BOOK JACKET.

"William Beckford's Vathek is a touchstone of eighteenth-century Orientalism and of the Gothic novel. Beckford's later work, The Episodes of Vathek, shares Vathek's irreverent and decadent style, and an edition that unites the two has long been overdue. The Broadview edition includes a newly discovered early version of the first episode, never before in print, that centres on male-male love, as well the previously published version that was re-written by Beckford as a heterosexual narrative. This edition, based on that of 1823 - the last one edited by the author - also introduces The Episodes in the order Beckford planned, and incorporates his final corrections."--BOOK JACKET.