Triumphant Bodies: Sexual Political Conquest in Women s Published Writing, 1660-1763

Product Description Triumphant Bodies: Sexual-Political Conquest in British Women s Published Writing, 1660-1769 builds on recent scholarship such as Ros Ballaster s Seductive Forms and Catherine Gallagher s Nobody s Story in order to draw attention to professional female authors use of a pliant vocabulary of sexuality and politics during the eighteenth century. Throughout the study, Smith emphasizes the blending of gendered, sexed, and politicized language a blending that allowed women to provocatively challenge, undermine, and rearticulate the terms of power and authority that were available to them in the literary marketplace. Triumphant Bodies centers on Aphra Behn, Mary Wortley Montagu, Charlotte Lennox, and Frances Brooke, with additional glances toward their contemporaries, including John Dryden, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Delarivier Manley, Henry Fielding, Anne Finch, Mary Leapor, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and Horace Walpole. Smith positions women s writing within dominant traditions but argues that women writers simultaneously understood themselves s part of a gendered trajectory. By drawing together a diverse and expansive range of texts by women, this study suggests the complexity of any attempt to define women s authorial triumphs during this period of tremendous vigor and transformation in the literary marketplace. About the Author Emily Smith received her Ph.D. in English and a certificate in women s studies from Emory University. Her publications include Traces of Aphra Behn in Frances Brooke s The History of Emily Montague, Genre s Phantastical Garb : The fashion of form in Margaret Cavendish s Natures Pictures Drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life, and Frances Brooke s erotic-didactic garden: Desire, shame, and sensibility in The Excursion. Currently she is working on a book about eighteenth-century women s representations of non-page writing surfaces in connection with the print construction of the published female author.