Cambrian Bards and Antiquarian Romantics: Anglophone Women Poets from Eighteenth-Century Wales

Author(s):  
Sarah Prescott
Author(s):  
Jennifer Batt

Nearly every monthly magazine published in the eighteenth century had a poetry section, a regular slot given over in each issue to poetic expression of all kinds, written by a broad range of writers, both male and female, provincial and metropolitan, amateur and established. This chapter assesses the place that women poets, both familiar and unfamiliar, occupied in the rich poetic culture that made magazines possible. Jennifer Batt’s case studies are drawn from national periodicals such as the Gentleman’s Magazine (1731–1922), London Magazine (1732–85) and British Magazine (1746–51), as well as from regional magazines. Collectively, these examples shed light on the possibilities that periodicals made available to female poets (of giving them a voice, a readership, a public profile and place within a poetic community). At the same, Batt demonstrates that women could be exploited by the medium and its editorial practices (publishing without author consent, for instance, or intrusive framing of poems) in ways that have overdetermined women poets’ critical reception.


Author(s):  
Peter Kornicki

This section considers the introduction of Chinese writing to Vietnam and subsequent literary activity in Vietnam using Literary Chinese. It notes that no book printed before 1697 has survived, although printing began in Vietnam centuries earlier, and not a single ancient manuscript either. It traces the development of Chinese prose and poetry written by Vietnamese, including some women poets, and the impact of the development of the vernacular script chữ nôm. Although the contours of the practice are not yet well understood, at least by the eighteenth century it had become increasingly common to combine Chinese texts with vernacular translations or explanations to facilitate understanding.


2014 ◽  
Vol 90 (2) ◽  
pp. 85-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashley Cross

‘Writing Pain’ argues that Anna Seward‘s Letters (1811) and Mary Robinson‘s letters (1800) create alternative models of sensibility from the suffering poet of Charlotte Smith‘s Elegiac Sonnets. Immensely popular, Smith‘s sonnets made feminine suffering a source of poetic agency by aestheticizing and privatizing it. However, despite their sincerity, her sonnets effaced the physical, nervous body of sensibility on which Seward‘s and Robinsons early poetic reputations had depended and for which they had been mocked. The popularity of Smith‘s model made it an important model for women poets, but, by the end of the eighteenth century, sensibility was also associated with sickness and artifice. For Seward and Robinson, who wanted to build their literary reputations but were living with disabled bodies, Smiths example needed to be reimagined to account for the reciprocity of body and mind as they struggled to write through pain.


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