Product Description: This book examines a key topic in modern literary studies. Contextual factors shape our perception of how literary texts are made, and how they are read. Their understanding is fundamental to the study of English at undergraduate level and is becoming increasingly important at 'A' Level...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

A collection of essays bringing together views from women who make literature their "business". Taken as a whole, the essays form a dialogue between authors, editors, critics and teachers of literature, thus illuminating the debate about women, writing and the market-place. The book examines some of the difficulties that women experience in trying to write themselves into a culture which in critical and commercial terms has been largely dominated by men. Through its focus on the commercial and professional dimensions of women's writing, the volume reflects a shift in the current critical climate away from the idea of women as marginal to the publishing industry and towards a celebration of their success. (view table of contents)

Product Description: This is a collection of essays written by some of the leading modern authorities in Austen studies, and it demonstrates how these works can have diverse and often polarized critical readings.

This study focuses on literature for girls. Written by women for children, such texts have been doubly marginalized by the critical establishment. Using 20th-century feminist critical practice, the authors open up fresh perspectives on popular fiction written for girls between 1850 and 1920.

Product Description: Located in a world wrestling with new concepts of what it means to be modern, this book forms a penetrating analysis of a mid-twentieth century English woman novelist, whose genius was compared to Tolstoy. Rosamond Lehmann's first book, Dusty Answer (1927), with its scandalous subject matter, made her a literary celebrity at the age of twenty-seven...read more

Product Description: This highly original book investigates the part played by their personal writings in the lives of eight literary women. Can private journals provide information about their authors' public works? Do diaries dramatise the development of an individual literary `voice'? What was the special attraction of the diary form for women, and why has it been so undervalued? Drawing on current feminist critical approaches, Judy Simons explores these and other questions in a stimulating and wide-ranging study of women's diary writing, which revises our entire way of thinking about this traditionally neglected genre and its particular implications for the woman writer...read more

Product Description: The first comprehensive critical study of the work of Fanny Burney. Living in a world where male supremacy was unchallenged, Burney pioneered the 'women's novel' by presenting a distinctively female perspective in English fiction...read more