Guest Editors
Dr Yi-cheng Weng (National Taiwan University, Taiwan)
Dr Gillian Dow (University of Southampton, UK)
The previous decades have seen the publications of stimulating and ground-breaking works that seek to recuperate and reconsider British women writers of this period. Literary criticism and feminist literary history have celebrated the existence and achievement of women writers, and shown that they were crucial participants in facilitating changes, transitions, and innovations in social and cultural movements, as well as literary styles.
This special issue, the first to focus on women’s writing in The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture, is scheduled to be published in June 2023. We invite essays of 6000-10000 words, that explore the diversity of women’s writing in the latter half of the long eighteenth century, when – in Britain at any rate – women writers were entering the literary marketplace in increasing numbers. Inspired by past scholarship on women’s writing, and especially narratives about women’s roles as negotiators and innovators that have consistently shaped our understanding of their work, the editors are keen to take advantage of the internationally collaborative nature of this special issue. We seek papers that explore perspectives on how women writers engaged in conversations about questions of politics, gender, war, nation, history, and art in Britain, continental Europe, and beyond. By looking across borders, and inviting contributions from colleagues working in a variety of institutional settings across the globe, we hope to weave together multitudinous narratives and responses to key cultural and literary developments of the age.
Possible topics for this special issue may include but are not limited to:
- Women and places: home, institutions, traveling, and revisiting
- Women and cultures: encounters beyond borders
- Sociability and public roles
- Distance and intimacy
- Female aesthetics
- Reception and translation: women in other worlds
- Women and materiality: object, fashion, and material culture
- Women writing about changes: interruptions, interventions, and innovations
- Emotions and feelings
- Women and illness
- Women and cosmopolitanism
- Art, theatre, and literature
- Women’s writing about slavery, empire, and imperialism
- Women and enlightenment
- Teaching women’s writing in a global context
Please follow the submission guidelines detailed on The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture website (https://www.wreview.org/index.php/submission-guidelines.html), and submit your articles online by 31st March 2022 (extended deadline).
The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture, founded in 1995, is an open-access peer-reviewed journal of literary and cultural studies, and one of the most reputable academic journals in Taiwan. It offers a unique space to bring together scholars from around the world to address important issues and debates in a wide range of research areas. It is currently indexed in: Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI); SCOPUS; EBSCOhost; MLA International Bibliography; Taiwan Humanities Citation Index (THCI).
We welcome informal enquiries, and proposals for co-authored contributions. Please contact the co-editors: Yi-cheng Weng (yichengweng@ntu.edu.tw) and Gillian Dow (G.Dow@soton.ac.uk).
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Yi-cheng Weng is Assistant Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Taiwan University. She holds a PhD in English from King’s College London, where she researched conservative novels of the 1790s, and has previously taken visiting fellowships at Chawton House Library (UK) and Academia Sinica (Taiwan). Her previous publications consider and explore the diversity of women's writing in the 18th and early 19th centuries, but the novel has always been a central concern for her. She is currently engaged in a cross-disciplinary research project on visual art and literature, and is completing an article on the representations of women in portrait.
Gillian Dow is an Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Southampton, and Vice-President of the British Association of Romantic Studies (BARS). She has been associated with Chawton House – a rare books library focusing on women writers in the period 1660-1830 – since 2005, and was seconded as Executive Director from 2014-2019. Her co-edited collections include Women’s Writing, 1660-1830: Feminisms and Futures (Palgrave, 2016), co-edited with Jennie Batchelor; Uses of Austen: Jane’s Afterlives (Palgrave, 2012), co-edited with Clare Hanson; Readers, Writers, Salonnieres: Female Networks in Europe, 1700-1900 (Peter Lang, 2011), co-edited with Hilary Brown. She is currently writing a book on women translators in Romantic-Period Britain and France.