Aphra Behn Studies by Janet Todd

Aphra Behn Studies by Janet Todd

Aphra Behn was England's first professional woman writer, but her status as a major author has only recently become clear. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, Behn was denigrated for her 'unwomanly' subject matter and intellectual immodesty. In the twentieth century she has been increasingly viewed as an important dramatist and poet of the Restoration and a founder of the English novel. This book sets Behn firmly in an historical context of political factions, theatre developments and colonial encounters, and includes chapters on each of the genres in which she wrote: drama, fiction, poetry and translation, and on other aspects of her life, from her publishing struggles to her involvement in American slavery. It is an important resource for those studying seventeenth-century English literature and drama, and to those interested in the development of women's writing.

"This collection clearly conveys the centrality of Behn's gender as well as to the history of her reception, which is outlined by Todd in her introductionBehn enters the canon emphatically as a woman. Todd's timely collection, embracing a variety of approaches and covering all aspects of Behn's literary output, makes an important contribution to this process." Albion
"This collection is powerful evidence of the impact of the women's movement and the maturity of feminist scholarship." Modern Philology

Janet Todd is an internationally renowned scholar of early women writers. She has edited the complete works of England's first professional woman writer, Aphra Behn, and the Enlightenment feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as novels by Charlotte Smith, Mary Shelley and Eliza Fenwick and memoirs of the confidence trickster Mary Carleton.

Janet Todd is the general editor of the 9-volume Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen and editor ofJane Austen in Context and the Cambridge Companion to Pride and Prejudice. Among her critical works areWomen's Friendship in Literature, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction 1660-1800 and theCambridge Introduction to Jane Austen. She has written four biographies: of Aphra Behn and three linked women, Mary Wollstonecraft, her daughter, and her aristocratic Irish pupils. Lady Susan Plays the Game is her first foray into fiction.

In the 1970s Janet Todd taught in the USA, during which time she began the first journal devoted to women's writing. Back in the UK in the 1990s she co-founded the journal Women's Writing. Janet has had a peripatetic and busy life, working at universities in Ghana, the US, and Puerto Rico, as well as England and Scotland. She is now an emeritus professor at the University of Aberdeen and lives in Cambridge.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780521119641
ISBN 10	0521119642
Title	Aphra Behn Studies
Author	Janet Todd
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Cambridge University Press
Year published	2009-09-17
Number of pages	344
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.