Description - The Selected Works of Eliza Haywood by Alex Pettit
Eliza Haywood (1693?-1756) was the most prolific female writer of the 18th century, author of more than 75 volumes of conduct and advice literature, criticism, journalism, fiction, drama, pseudo-memoirs and literary parody. Her enormous popularity in her own day is a matter of record: one scholar has demonstrated that her first novel "share(s) with "Gulliver's Travels" the distinction of being the most popular English fiction of the 18th century before "Pamela"". The material presented here is among Haywood's richest, both in terms of coverage and in terms of prose style. Here, Haywood explicates and defends the ideas about, for example, gender and culture that she develops obliquely elsewhere; here, she establishes herself as an incisive commentator on 18th-century culture as well as a writer of sensationalist fiction. In our own time, Haywood's interest in matters of gender and her lively, sometimes lurid, style have made her the subject of a rapidly expanding body of scholarship.
According to the Modern Language Association's "International Bibliography of Language and Literature", more publications about Haywood have appeared in the last decade than had appeared in the preceding 25 years; more than a dozen have appeared in the last few years alone. "Suddenly", the well-known critic Paula Backscheider writes in a 1998 essay, "Haywood is everywhere". Backscheider is right to assert that "we need to ...engage [Haywood's] text as we have those of Aphra Benn, Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson with the full arsenal of contemporary critical theory". But one wonders how we might go about doing so, given the paucity of primary material available to us. If Haywood's critical stock is soaring, her bibliographical status remains depressingly earth-bound. The series reprints selected non-fictional works by Haywood, with particular attention to the journalism, criticism and "conduct and advice" material. The editor matter includes a general introduction, headnotes and index. In addition to textual introductions to each work, the edition will also include a substantial biographical introduction by Christine Blouch.
This will be by far the most complete treatment of Haywood's life to date and should stand as a definitive account for years to come.
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