Alessa Johns

An examination of British and German processes of cultural transfer, as spearheaded by feminist reformists, from 1714 to 1837

Bluestocking Feminism and British-German Cultural Transfer, 1750-1837

Katrin Berndt

The handbook offers a comprehensive introduction to the British novel in the long eighteenth century, when this genre emerged to develop into the period’s most versatile and popular literary form. Part I features six systematic chapters that discuss literary, intellectual, socio-economic, and political contexts, providing innovative approaches to issues such as sense and sentiment, gender considerations, formal characteristics, economic history, enlightened and radical concepts of citizenship and human rights, ecological ramifications, and Britain’s growing global involvement. Part II presents twenty-five analytical chapters that attend to individual novels, some canonical and others recently recovered. These analyses engage the debates outlined in the systematic chapters, undertaking in-depth readings that both contextualize the works and draw on relevant criticism, literary theory, and cultural perspectives. The handbook’s breadth and depth, clear presentation, and lucid language make it attractive and accessible to scholar and student alike.

Handbook of the British Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century

As scholarly interest has turned to emotion and affect, Reflections on Sentiment offers examples of Enlightenment feeling both challenging and promoting the period’s touted reason and realism. Essays explore the complex relation of thought and sentiment in discourses from moral treatises and religious debates to interrogations of gender and family relations, from fictional tests of boundaries between human and non-human species to innovations in the forms of poetry, the novel, and the literary marketplace itself.

Essays in Honor of George Starr

Reflections on Sentiment

No human society has ever been perfect, a fact that has led thinkers as far back as Plato and St. Augustine to conceive of utopias both as a fanciful means of escape from an imperfect reality and as a useful tool with which to design improvements upon it. The most studied utopias have been proposed by men, but during the eighteenth century a group of reform-oriented female novelists put forth a series of work that expressed their views of, and their reservations about, ideal societies. In Women's Utopias of the Eighteenth Century, Alessa Johns examines the utopian communities envisaged by Mary Astell, Sarah Fielding, Mary Hamilton, Sarah Scott, and other writers from Britain and continental Europe, uncovering the ways in which they resembled--and departed from--traditional utopias. Johns demonstrates that while traditional visions tended to look back to absolutist models, women's utopias quickly incorporated emerging liberal ideas that allowed far more room for personal initiative and gave agency to groups that were not culturally dominant, such as the female writers themselves. Women's utopias, Johns argues, were reproductive in nature. They had the potential to reimagine and perpetuate themselves.

Women's Utopias of the Eighteenth Century

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Confronting Natural Catastrophe in the Age of Enlightenment

Dreadful Visitations

This volume offers an historical perspective on the cultural impact of disasters, examining 18th-century responses to the natural catastrophes that challenged the period's claim to reason and mastery of the environment.

Alessa Johns

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