Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England: A Culture of Paper Credit

by Catherine Ingrassia

Overview

Catherine Ingrassia looks at the contemporaneous development of speculative investment and the popular novel in the early eighteenth century. She shows that women were actively involved in finance as well as in fiction, and that both of these activities allowed women access to important new models for their social, sexual, and economic interaction. Ingrassia considers women's participation in the South Sea Bubble, and later focuses on the careers of Eliza Haywood and two of her male contemporaries, Alexander Pope and Samuel Richardson.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521023016
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	11/17/2005
Edition description:	Revised ed.
Pages:	244
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.59(d)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements; Introduction: paper credit; 1. Women, credit and the South Sea Bubble; 2. Pope, gender, and the commerce of culture; 3. Eliza Haywood and the culture of professional authorship; 4. The (gender) politics of the literary marketplace; 5. Samuel Richardson and the domestication of paper credit; Conclusion: negotiable paper; Notes; Index; Bibliography.

Editorial Reviews

"...an interesting and worthwhile book." Laura L. Runge, Modern Philology

"Among the many pleasure's of Ingrassia's book is its clear and forceful style; this is a truly readable book as well as a provocative one." The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual

"Catherine Ingrassia's book will probably be more satisfying to those readers who equate the 'culture' of its title with popular print representation. I offer this review as an extremely satisfied reader who sees Commerce and Gender as one more good reason why it is productive, in attempting to reconstruct early modern history, to make this equation...Ingrassia enables our thinking of gender as a term central to how the English understood and represented economic and social changes." Albion

From the Publisher