Heroines and Local Girls: The Transnational Emergence of Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century

by Pamela L. Cheek

Overview

Over the course of the long eighteenth century, a network of some fifty women writers, working in French, English, Dutch, and German, staked out a lasting position in the European literary field. These writers were multilingual and lived for many years outside of their countries of origin, translated and borrowed from each others' works, attended literary circles and salons, and fashioned a transnational women's literature characterized by highly recognizable codes. Drawing on a literary geography of national types, women writers across Western Europe read, translated, wrote, and rewrote stories about exceptional young women, literary heroines who transcend the gendered destiny of their distinctive cultural and national contexts. These transcultural heroines struggle against the cultural constraints determining the sexualized fates of local girls.

In Heroines and Local Girls, Pamela L. Cheek explores the rise of women's writing as a distinct, transnational category in Britain and Europe between 1650 and 1810. Starting with an account of a remarkable tea party that brought together Frances Burney, Sophie von La Roche, and Marie Elisabeth de La Fite in conversation about Stéphanie de Genlis, she excavates a complex community of European and British women authors. In chapters that incorporate history, network theory, and feminist literary history, she examines the century-and-a-half literary lineage connecting Madame de Maintenon to Mary Wollstonecraft, including Charlotte Lennox and Françoise de Graffigny and their radical responses to sexual violence. Neither simply a reaction to, nor collusion with, patriarchal and national literary forms but, rather, both, women's writing offered an invitation to group membership through a literary project of self-transformation. In so doing, argues Cheek, women's writing was the first modern literary category to capitalize transnationally on the virtue of identity, anticipating the global literary marketplace's segmentation of affinity-based reading publics, and continuing to define women's writing to this day.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781512826166
Publisher:	University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Publication date:	02/27/2024
Series:	Haney Foundation Series
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Pamela L. Cheek is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of New Mexico and author of Sexual Antipodes: Enlightenment Globalization and the Placing of Sex.

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Preface

Heroines and Local Girls asks a technical question, an affective question, and a historical question. Where does something that many readers identify as "women's writing" fit within world literature? What procedures do texts that count as women's writing follow to procure a sense of attachment among readers? And how did the placement of women's writing in the world literary field build on these procedures to produce a transnational concept of women's identity? The textual devices invented by women writers in the long eighteenth century fostered group affinity across borders of social rank and nation in ways that proved to be enduring and adaptive. Perhaps the most influential of these devices was the focus on the differences in perception between the powerless and the powerful and, commensurately, on the stakes of resisting a hegemonic forcing or overwriting of perception. The transnational category now known as women's writing arose from the possibility of capitalizing on a new supranational market sector targeting women readers. It solidified with the invention of narrative means for affirming women's versions of women's stories, particularly in the depiction of differential perceptions of sexual violence and of the gender roles associated with European cultures.

Multiple waves of feminism have rightly pointed to the problems with thinking about women as a transnational and unified cadre. Such critiques identify how women's writing may obscure specific intersectional experiences connected to race, class, sexuality, culture, geography, and gender. Yet less investigation has been devoted to how and why the category of women's writing came to be so adept at surviving and multiplying. Why, despite its significant political limitations, has it been able to grow and to absorb different interests as well as to serve as an incubator for new sectors of writing that provide a space of attachment for new identities, including intersectional ones? What might be called an emergent phenomenon of European women writing in the long eighteenth century provides some answers to this question.

Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1. Networks of Women Writers Circa 1785-87
Chapter 2. Two Quarrels
Chapter 3. Ravishing and Romance Language
Chapter 4. The Repertoire of the School for Girls
Chapter 5. Heroines and Local Girls
Chapter 6. Heroines in the World

Notes
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

"With her heroines and local girls, Pamela L. Cheek draws attention to two ways in which women could be textually related to the literary field in the long eighteenth century: by defining an aristocratic and cosmopolitan concept of gender identity oneself or, on the other hand, by being determined through a local experience of gender practice. This double definition actually enables Cheek to unfold a new map of literary history, making it possible for today's readers to see ‘women's literature’ at work as a vital critical category, but inviting us all along, also, to articulate its meaning for the women writers themselves in their own century. Cheek's argument is very compelling and makes us look at a number of well-known texts with fresh eyes. Her comparative reading of Charlotte Lennox with Françoise de Graffigny and that of Frances Burney with Mme de Staël are particularly stunning."

Women’s Writing

"[Cheek's]book helpfully urges a broader, transnational evaluation of European writing that allows more encompassing conclusions about gender and the importance of literary production. It offers stimulus for future scholarship throughout, and its nuanced, networked picture of historical women's words and lives challenges the limits imposed by longstanding, nation-oriented academic structures."

The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats

"This deeply researched book provides a much-needed transnational history of the emergence of women’s writing as a distinct body of literature through an analysis of both the writerly and readerly approaches that facilitate intra-sexual and textual community-building. It seeks to elucidate the strategies that favor the move from the identification of the individual female reader with a work of literature to the consolidation of a collective subsection of women’s writing....This is a wide-ranging, meticulously detailed book that is densely packed with important insights."

Europe Now

"[I]t certainly should be read, and because the coverage is remarkable, the book can be profitably read in parts. But to read the whole book has additional rewards, as Cheek interweaves familiar texts with a great many others that few of us have read to illuminate how networks of women writers in the long eighteenth century involved each other in literary projects of female identity. This book opens so many roads of discovery that we will profit from it for a long time.

"

Modern Language Quaterly

"This impressive work presents a revelatory model of discussing networks that intercon­nects with transnationalism and the theoretical ramifications of interdependence, not only among different national literatures but especially among individual women writers. It clearly suggests the wealth of possibilities and trajectories that the study of women's writ­ing offers, and it shows how a supple approach to national questions and traditions brings to the fore previously hidden lines of communication and conjunctions. Erudite and com pelling, Cheek's book, while addressing the long eighteenth century, is a lively model for studying complex patterns of influence, regardless of the specificities of individual dis­ciplines."

Novel

"This is a bold, risk-taking book. It is both theoretically engaged and admirable in scope and aims. In it, Pamela L. Cheek attempts a transnational history of women’s writing in the long eighteenth century. She asks an important question: Where does 'women’s writing' fit within the category of 'world literature'?...Heroines and Local Girls will remain an important touchstone for us all in the coming years, as we continue to explore writers across borders and write our literary histories anew."

Early Modern Women

"Pamela L. Cheek makes an extraordinarily important contribution not just to our understanding of women's writing but also to our thinking about the international circulation and reception of literary texts. Few scholars have anything like Cheek's range, and her ability to speak of the importance of translation without converting it into an easy alignment of one national dictionary with another marks her book with a combination of availability and precision. Heroines and Local Girls is indispensable reading for anyone interested in women's writing and how literature crosses national boundaries."

University of Chicago Frances Ferguson

"[Cheek’s study] has an important part to play in one of the perennial questions posed in women’s studies: Where does something that many readers identify as ‘women’s writing’ fit within European or world literature?...Cheek deftly traverses an astonishing range of materials across different languages. Her ability to speak to the importance of translation without converting it into an easy alignment of one national dictionary with another marks her book with a combination of accessibility and accuracy. Heroines and Local Girls will be indispensable reading for anyone interested in women’s writing in the long eighteenth century and how literary texts cross national boundaries."

Journal of British Studies

"Pamela L. Cheek makes an extraordinarily important contribution not just to our understanding of women's writing but also to our thinking about the international circulation and reception of literary texts. Few scholars have anything like Cheek's range, and her ability to speak of the importance of translation without converting it into an easy alignment of one national dictionary with another marks her book with a combination of availability and precision. Heroines and Local Girls is indispensable reading for anyone interested in women's writing and how literature crosses national boundaries."

Universityof Chicago Frances Ferguson

[I]t certainly should be read, and because the coverage is remarkable, the book can be profitably read in parts. But to read the whole book has additional rewards, as Cheek interweaves familiar texts with a great many others that few of us have read to illuminate how networks of women writers in the long eighteenth century involved each other in literary projects of female identity. This book opens so many roads of discovery that we will profit from it for a long time.

Modern Language Policy

"Cheek deftly traverses an astonishing range of materials across different languages. Her ability to speak to the importance of translation without converting it into an easy alignment of one national dictionary with another marks her book with a combination of accessibility and accuracy. Heroines and Local Girls will be indispensable reading for anyone interested in women's writing in the long eighteenth century and how literary texts cross national boundaries."—Journal of British Studies

"Pamela L. Cheek makes an extraordinarily important contribution not just to our understanding of women's writing but also to our thinking about the international circulation and reception of literary texts. Few scholars have anything like Cheek's range, and her ability to speak of the importance of translation without converting it into an easy alignment of one national dictionary with another marks her book with a combination of availability and precision. Heroines and Local Girls is indispensable reading for anyone interested in women's writing and how literature crosses national boundaries."—Frances Ferguson, University of Chicago

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