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Eighteenth-Century Women’s Writing and the Methodist Media Revolution argues that Methodism in the eighteenth century was a media event that uniquely combined and utilized different types of media to reach a vast and diverse audience. Specifically, it traces specific cases of how evangelical and Methodist discourse practices interacted with major cultural and literary events during the long eighteenth-century, from the rise of the novel to the Revolution controversy of the 1790’s to the shifting ground for women writers leading up to the Reform era in the 1830’s. The book maps the religious discourse patterns of Methodism onto works by authors like Samuel Richardson, Mary Wollstonecraft, Hannah More, Elizabeth Hamilton, Mary Tighe, and Felicia Hemans. This not only provides a better sense of the religious nuances of these authors’ better-known works, but also provides a fuller consideration of the wide variety of genres women were writing in during the period, many of which continue to be read as ‘non-literary’. The scope of the book leads the reader from the establishment of evangelical forms of discourse in the 1730’s to the natural ends of these discourse structures during the era of reform, all the while pointing to ways in which women—Methodist and otherwise—modified these discourse patterns as acts of resistance or subversion.

Gendered Ecologies: New Materialist Interpretations of Women Writers in the Long Nineteenth Century is comprised of a diverse collection of essays featuring analyses of literary women writers, ecofeminism, feminist ecocriticism, and the value of the interrelationships that exist among human, nonhuman, and nonliving entities as part of the environs. The book presents a case for the often-disregarded literary women writers of the long nineteenth century, who were active contributors to the discourse of natural history—the diachronic study of participants as part of a vibrant community interconnected by matter. While they were not natural philosophers as in the cases of Sir Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, and Michael Faraday among others, these women writers did engage in acute observations of materiality in space (e.g., subjects, objects, and abjects), reasoned about their findings, and encoded their discoveries of nature in their literary and artistic productions. The collection includes discussions of the works of influential literary women from the long nineteenth century—Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Caroline Norton, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Margaret Fuller, Susan Fenimore Cooper, Celia Thaxter, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Francis Wright, and Lydia Maria Child—whose multi-directional observations of animate and inanimate objects in the natural domain are based on self-made discoveries while interacting with the environs.

Revisionary Narratives examines the historical and formal evolutions of Moroccan women’s auto/biography in the last four decades, particularly its conflation with testimony and its expansion beyond literary texts. It analyzes auto/biographical and testimonial acts in Arabic, colloquial Moroccan Darija, French, and English in the fields of prison narratives, visual arts, theater performance, and digital media, situating them within specific sociopolitical and cultural contexts of production and consumption. Part One begins by tracing the rise of a feminist consciousness in prison narratives produced and/or published in the late 1970s through the 2000s. Part Two moves to analyzing the ubiquity of auto/biography and testimony in the arts as well as contemporary sociopolitical activism. The focus throughout the various case studies is women’s engagement with patriarchal and (neo)imperial norms and practices as they relate to their experiences of political violence, activism, migration, and displacement. To understand why and how women collapse the boundaries between autobiography, biography, testimony, and sociopolitical commentary, the book employs a broad, transdisciplinary, montage approach that combines theories on gender and autobiography and takes into account postcolonial, postmodern, transnational, transglobal and translocal perspectives.

This book presents the history and current state of women’s experimental poetry in Britain — a critically neglected, significant body of contemporary writing — and places it within the wider social and political contexts of the period. Ranging from Geraldine Monk’s ventriloquising of the Pendle witches to Denise Riley’s fiercely self-critical lyric poems, from the multimedia experiments of Maggie O’Sullivan to the globally aware, politicised sequences of Andrea Brady and Jennifer Cooke, this book theorises women’s alternative poetry in terms of Julia Kristeva’s idea of ‘women’s time’ and in terms of the female poetic voice constantly negotiating with dominant systems of representation.