Feminist Book History

Bibliography

Feminist Literary Criticism: Groundwork

Gilbert and Gubar 1979 -- Madwoman in the Attic -- released the same year as the first two-volume edition of Eisenstein 1983, which cites McLuhan as inspiration; founding moment of women's and book history together

Auerbach 1980 -- review of Madwoman in the Attic

Showalter 1981 -- "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness" -- founding gynocriticism

Gubar 1981 -- "The Blank Page"

Miller 1985 -- "Rereading as a Woman: The Body in Practice"

King 1995 -- "Of Needles and Pens and Women's Work" -- instrumental in redirecting conversation away from pens and towards needles

Federico 2009 -- Madwoman in the Attic after 30 Years

Feminist Editing / Textual Studies

Ross and Salzman 2016 -- edited collection; helpfully lays out tradition of feminist recuperation and how that early activist work is being resituated in current scholarly contexts

Ezell, Margaret J. M. "Editing Early Modern Women's Manuscripts: Theory, Electronic Editions, and the Accidental Copy-Text." Literature Compass 7.2 (2010): 102-109.

"Clearly there has been the practice of feminist editing, recovering texts from obscurity and making them widely available for classroom use to challenge and change the nature of the traditional canon. Do the now post-feminist literary editors of early modern women writers clamor for a new cladistics redefining the family of texts from a feminist perspective to create scholarly editions of early modern women’s texts or will the existing models created for us by Greg, Bowers, Tanselle, McGann, and their heirs do just fine? In particular, are there issues raised by early modern women’s manuscript materials which are not usefully addressed by current principles and practices of editing early modern manuscripts for print? Finally, if one turns to e-editions – surely a ‘gender free’ zone, some might think – are there issues arising from the recent history of the recovery of early women’s manuscripts about which we should think further?" (103)

Work on th eMLA Committee on Scholarly Editions -- "the guidelines for vetting a scholarly edition seemed to suggest that producing a truly 'scholarly' edition of such types of material as I was working on would be quite impossible." -- only 1 extant copy of some women's works, no need for Greg's method, etc.

"These are manuscripts that resist or repel the traditional models for determining how a manuscript should be edited." (103) -- no variants or authorial intention

"Are there some early modern texts that simply cannot, or perhaps even should not, be edited for a print format and with these texts will an electronic edition solve our problems?" (103)

"I have argued elsewhere that in the new narrative of the history of the book, early modern manuscript volumes are being cast in very similar terms as early modern women writers were in the 1980s –either the handwritten volume is ignored as if it does not exist, or it is some oddity which was as Tanselle suggests ungoverned by the social decorum demanded of ‘real’ literature, that is printed works (‘Invisible Books’)." (104)

"I have repeatedly argued that in the attempt to make early modern manuscripts more accessible to modern users, archivists and librarians in their attempts to classify and to preserve have in fact obscured texts with their labels such as ‘commonplace book’, ‘recipe book’ and ‘meditations’, what is actually being performed in the text itself (‘Redefining Early Women Writers’). These are genres which are particularly associated with the surviving manuscripts by early modern women and volumes which typically have multiple authors contained in them. Related to this attempt to document and classify materials, it seems to me, is the way in which existing theories of the copy-text and editing early modern materials are willing to ‘sacrifice’ aspects of the original in pursuit of usability for the modern reader." (106)

Editor's task is usually taken to be distinguishing between varants, errors, slips of the pen -- but these are crucial part of the meaning of manuscrips

Do e-editions solve this problem? Not really.

"What concerns me is that I hear in the narratives told by the current history of the book and in the rhetorics of editorial principles and practices for early modern texts the same types of language which obscured, misrepresented, and ‘lost’ for generations the writings of early modern women. Because of this easy transference of older critical terms and textual conceptualizations into a new editorial media, I would argue that editors of electronic projects, too, still need to be more aware of the significance of the materiality of texts, of the social conventions of handwritten culture as they may differ from print cultures, and the multiple ways in which these unique, single copy-texts are of interest and value to scholars. Otherwise, we will run the risk of continuing to classify, describe, and edit them in ways that ‘edit’ out the richness and complexity of their ways of communicating. Perhaps there is still room for a little positive feminist interrogation of editorial principles after all, in the mutual pursuit of the recovery of textual communities." (109)