Mary Wortley Montagu

In Tropicopolitans Srinivas Aravamudan reconstructs the colonial imagination of the eighteenth century. By exploring representations of peoples & cultures subjected to colonial discourse, he makes a case for the agency-or the capacity to resist domination-of those oppressed. Aravamudan's analysis of texts that accompanied European commercial & imperial expansion from the Glorious Revolution through the French Revolution reveals the development of anticolonial consciousness prior to the nineteenth century. "Tropicalization" is the central metaphor of this analysis, a term that incorporates both the construction of various dynamic tropes by which the colonized are viewed & the site of the study, primarily the tropics. Tropicopolitans, then, are those subaltern people who bear & resist the representations of colonialist discourse. In readings that expose new relationships between literary representation & colonialism in the eighteenth century, Aravamudan considers such texts as Behn's Oroonoko, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe & Captain Singleton, Addison's Cato, & Swift's Gulliver's Travels & The Drapier's Letters. He extends his argument to include analyses of Johnson's Rasselas, Beckford's Vathek, Montague's travel letters, Equiano's autobiography, Burke's political & aesthetic writings, & Abbe de Raynal's Histoire des deux Indes. Offering a radical approach to literary history, this study provides new mechanisms for understanding the development of anticolonial agency. Introducing eighteenth-century studies to a postcolonial hermeneutics, Tropicopolitans will interest scholars engaged in postcolonial studies, eighteenth-century literature, & literary theory.

A major task confronting today's scholars is the reclamation from near oblivion of a multitude of works of art, literature, music, scholarship, and other creative enterprises by eighteenth-century women. This fascinating collection provides a multifaceted approach to understanding the roles played by women as both creators of and subjects within works of art in the eighteenth century.

Although Lady Mary was long well-known as a "character," a letter writer, and a traveler, there has recently been a renewed widespread and serious interest in her literary work. Despite being an aristocrat and a woman, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) made herself into a writer. She saw herself as "haunted by the Daemon of Poesie." She wrote literary criticism of Addison and the only essay by a woman published in the Spectator, together with spirited verse replies to Pope and Swift, and passionate love-poems which dispute the period's label "Age of Reason." Her essays (some published anonymously in newspapers) and poems (many of which appeared with or without her secret connivance) deal with issues still alive and accessible today: love, marriage, prejudice against women writers, and the medical breakthrough of smallpox innoculation. Hard-hitting, eloquent, and often funny, the work of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu will be essential reading for the growing number of scholars, students, and general readers of women's writings.

Who were the women poets of the eighteenth century? This anthology presents writings by more than a hundred women, few of which have been published in conventional surveys and anthologies of eighteenth-century verse. Unlike the women who wrote fiction, the vast majority who wrote verse have been ignored and forgotten since their own day. Lonsdale's collection represents a diverse group of female poets from washerwomen to duchesses whose writings began mostly at home as informal and unpretentious verse. As they grew in number and confidence, the women began writing in a great variety of poetic forms and on public as well as private topics, eventually finding their way into print. The collection brings to light the vigor and immediacy with which women poets spoke--from the resentful and melancholic to the humorous and exuberant--about town and country, and love and marriage, opening a new perspective on their age and providing the grounds for a reassessment of a neglected aspect of literature.