1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910829148203321

Titolo

Bluestockings displayed : portraiture, performance and patronage, 1730-1830 / / edited by Elizabeth Eger [[electronic resource]]

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Cambridge : , : Cambridge University Press, , 2013

ISBN

1-316-15300-2

1-316-15349-5

1-316-15410-6

1-316-15335-5

0-511-66742-6

1-316-15435-1

1-316-15360-6

1-316-15385-1

1-316-15460-2

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (xv, 309 pages) : digital, PDF file(s)

Disciplina

820.9/928709033

Soggetti

English literature - Women authors - History and criticism

English literature - 18th century - History and criticism

English literature - 19th century - History and criticism

Women intellectuals - Great Britain

Literary patrons - Great Britain

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Romantic bluestockings: from muses to matrons / Anne Mellor -- 'To dazzle let the vain design': Alexander Pope's portrait gallery; or, the Impossibility of brilliant women / Emma Clery -- Virtue, patriotism and female scholarship in bluestocking portraiture / Clare Barlow -- Anne Seymour Damer: a sculptor of 'Republican perfection' / Alison Yarrington -- The blues gone grey: portraits of bluestocking women in old age / Devoney Looser -- Sacred love: Eliza Linley's voice / Joseph Roach -- The learned female soprano / Susan Staves -- Roles and role models: Montagu, Siddons, Lady Macbeth / Shearer West -- Hester Thrale: 'what trace of the wit' / Felicity A. Nussbaum -- Reading



practices in Elizabeth Montagu's epistolary network of the 1750s / Markman Ellis -- The queen of the blues, the Bluestocking Queen, and bluestocking masculinity / Clarissa Campbell-Orr -- Luck be a lady: patronage and professionalism for women writers in the 1790s / Harriet Guest.

Sommario/riassunto

The conversation parties of the bluestockings, held to debate contemporary ideas in eighteenth-century Britain, were vital in encouraging female artistic achievement. The bluestockings promoted links between learning and virtue in the public imagination, inventing a new kind of informal sociability that combined the life of the senses with that of the mind. This collection of essays, by leading scholars in the fields of literature, history and art history, provides an interdisciplinary treatment of bluestocking culture in eighteenth-century Britain. It is the first academic volume to concentrate on the rich visual and material culture that surrounded and supported the bluestocking project, from formal portraits and sculptures to commercially reproduced prints. By the early twentieth century, the term 'bluestocking' came to signify a dull and dowdy intellectual woman, but the original bluestockings inhabited a world in which brilliance was valued at every level and women were encouraged to shine and even dazzle.