Women Writing Fancy: Authorship and Autonomy from 1611 to 1812 [Hardcover]

This book brings to the foreground the largely forgotten Fancy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and follows its traces as they extend into the nineteenth and twentieth. Trivialized for its flightiness and femininity, Fancy nonetheless provided seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women writers such as Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, Eliza Haywood, and Anna Barbauld a mode of vision that could detect flaws in the Enlightenments patriarchal systems and glimpse new, female-authored worlds and genres. In carving out unreal, fanciful spaces within the larger frame of patriarchal culture, these women writers planted Fancyand, with it, female authorial inventionat the cornerstone of Enlightenment empirical endeavor. By finally taking Fancy seriously, this book offers an alternate genealogy of female authorship and a new framework for understanding modernitys triumph.