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Problems of authorship and attribution pose significant methodological challenges for researchers of Welsh-language women poets before 1800. These issues are contingent on the prevailing oral and manuscript cultures of transmission characteristic of Wales’s bardic culture, from which women were largely excluded. This article explores the unstable Welsh-language canon of poetry by women and highlights examples of problematic authorship and attestation. It also interrogates the diachronic wishful thinking of the Welsh feminist agenda alongside the synchronic reality of early modern women poets: is there a coherent female tradition and was it visible to early modern women poets? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over the last generation we have identified the large group of women writers active in Britain during the long Romantic age, and we have established indices and archives allowing a nearly complete access to their output. What remains to be done, however, is still a tall order: recovering lost biographies, relations with male authors and a male publishing establishment, the patronage and networks relied on for support, the means by which public influence was gained, not to mention a sustained critical commentary of the kind accumulated by canonical male authors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the late 1980s and early 1990s feminist scholars reviewed the way in which writing produced by early modern Englishwomen was being studied. They demanded more accurate and thorough historical research into both women's lives and their texts, and also a better understanding of women's use of genre. Recent anthologies of poetry demonstrate that while much extensive and valuable historical research has since taken place, the formal aspects of women's texts have been widely overlooked. In contrast, historicist interest in texts by men has been accompanied by a continued emphasis on literary style. These divergent critical approaches make it difficult to reconcile the two currently separate canons of literature by women and that by men, preventing a better appreciation of the early modern canon as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The readership for early modern women writers needs to be expanded and we need to consider the most effective ways to make this happen, whether it is to tempt the book-buying public or to induce university departments to include early modern women in undergraduate survey courses. Either way, it is important to remember the connection between commercial success and academic acceptance. One way forward is to consider where and how women's writing engages with the established literary canon. A formalist critical approach to poems by Katherine Philips and Hester Pulter positions their work within a tradition of Royalist writing and suggests an influence on Marvell's poetry; an appreciation of Lucy Hutchinson's translation of Lucretius elucidates links with Marvell and Milton. These interactions make it possible to begin to construct a history of women's writing and its interface with literary traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The body of the individual aroused special interest in discourses of the European Enlightenment. One of the questions at stake in literary, rhetorical and epistolary practices concerned what can be inferred about a person's inner self on the basis of his or her bodily appearance. In the second half of the 1700s, the new epistolary rhetoricians recommended that letter writers throw off the stiff personas of classical rhetoric and instead perform the discourse of the heart. The proposed performance, however, was constrained by new parameters, not least strong gender biases. The impact of these cultural discourses are discussed in relation to letters written between 1789 and 1791 by Julie Björckegren, the wife of a Swedish mayor, to Count Carl Sparre, her former lover. Her writing about her body and her social roles is interpreted as a self-reflective practice formed within the constraints of the rhetorical and cultural context. By this practice she shapes her subjectivity and constructs her self as a bourgeois woman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]