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)