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Julie
Campbell
and Angela
Vietto
.
. . both celebrated the publication of books with Ashgate
Press recently.
Julie's
book, Literary Circles and Gender in Early Modern Europe,
traces the complex interrelationships between women's writing in
Italy, France, and England during the sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries. In particular, the book
examines
the importance of the querelle des femmes—the quarrel over
the nature of women—a
sort of literary ritual in which women were alternately vilified or put
on pedestals and worshipped, in a way that subtly and not so subtly worked
to deny them the role of working, contributing intellectuals.
'Anne
Larsen, Professor of French at Hope College, says of Literary Circles
that it is "an ambitious,
very well-conceived, well-written monograph on a topic of great currency…
the originality of this study lies in its pairing of male and female writers,
together or in groups, that deftly underscores the subtle strategies and
realignments that educated women used to circumvent querelle blame. Its
analysis … enables us to understand much more fully the intertextual
connections between differing national literatures." An excerpt
appears in the December, 2004 Agora.
Angela's
book, Women and Authorship in Revolutionary America
,
builds on her previous
work as co-editor of two big readers, American Women Prose Writers
to 1820 (Thomson Gale, 1998) and Early American Writings
(Oxford, 2001), to take a rare synthetic approach that deals with women's
authorship across a variety of genres. Dealing with both well- and lesser-known
women writers of poetry, prose, fiction, and nonfiction, the study shows
how female authors drew on traditional conceptions of femininity and of
authorship to gain admission to an often resistant literary world.
According
to Susan S. Williams, "Women and Authorship provides important
ways of re-conceiving key concepts in early
American
women’s writing, including authorship, separate spheres, and the
construction of literary history. Engagingly written and highly informative,
it also models a new way of writing such history."
Both
books are part of Ashgate's series on Women
and Gender in the Early Modern World.
—JDK
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