FESTSCRIFT special edition of ‘Women’s Writing’ journal for Janet Todd. Editors: Ros Ballaster, Mansfield College, University of Oxford and Ruth Perry, MIT, USA. email: ros.ballaster@mansfield.ox.ac.uk and rperry@mit.edu.
A Life in Feminist Scholarship: Janet Todd has been a moving force in the discovery and analysis of the rich archive of women’s writing. Her work as archivist, scholar, anthologist, biographer, editor, critic, has brought the voices of 17th and 18th C. women to life and enlivened the scholarship on women. As Professor Todd retires from her post as President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, we are preparing a publication which will address and evaluate the state of the fields she has not only contributed to but shaped. Questions that we intend the publication to address include: to what extent are the imperatives of political ethics at odds with aesthetic judgement in feminist scholarship? How do we evaluate the past and see the future of feminist editing and anthologising, as well as biographies of women? What is the place of eighteenth-century studies and gender in new and emergent fields such as history of the book and cognitive studies? What do we know about how ideologies of gender changed and shifted historically in the long eighteenth century? We welcome contributions in any area of Professor Todd’s published research interests relating to women’s writing.
Topics may include but are not limited to:
– Eighteenth-century women’s writing, especially neglected works
– Women’s friendship in eighteenth-century literature
– Women and sensibility
– Educational writing by women and writing about the education of women
– Feminist literary history, criticism, and biography of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
– Encyclopaedias and dictionaries of women’s writing
– Editing and anthologies of women’s writing of the long eighteenth century
– Eighteenth-Century Irish women writers
– Aphra Behn
– Mary Wollstonecraft
– Jane Austen
– Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley circle
– Charlotte Smith
– Women’s biography
Please submit for consideration abstracts of at least 250 words to Ros Ballaster, University of Oxford (ros.ballaster@mansfield.ox.ac.uk) and Ruth Perry, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (rperry@mit.edu) by January 5. Finished articles of between 4,000-7000 words must be received by 1 September 2015.