Enfilade

First published in 2019, Heroines and Local Girls was awarded the 2022 Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies by the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at the University of Notre Dame; it’s  scheduled for paperback release in February.

Pamela Cheek, Heroines and Local Girls: The Transnational Emergence of Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 280 pages, ISBN: 978-0812251487 (hardcover), $85 / ISBN: 978-1512826166 (paperback), $30.

Over the course of the long eighteenth century, a network of some fifty women writers, working in French, English, Dutch, and German, staked out a lasting position in the European literary field. These writers were multilingual and lived for many years outside of their countries of origin, translated and borrowed from each others’ works, attended literary circles and salons, and fashioned a transnational women’s literature characterized by highly recognizable codes. Drawing on a literary geography of national types, women writers across Western Europe read, translated, wrote, and rewrote stories about exceptional young women, literary heroines who transcend the gendered destiny of their distinctive cultural and national contexts. These transcultural heroines struggle against the cultural constraints determining the sexualized fates of local girls.

In Heroines and Local Girls, Pamela L. Cheek explores the rise of women’s writing as a distinct, transnational category in Britain and Europe between 1650 and 1810. Starting with an account of a remarkable tea party that brought together Frances Burney, Sophie von La Roche, and Marie Elisabeth de La Fite in conversation about Stéphanie de Genlis, she excavates a complex community of European and British women authors. In chapters that incorporate history, network theory, and feminist literary history, she examines the century-and-a-half literary lineage connecting Madame de Maintenon to Mary Wollstonecraft, including Charlotte Lennox and Françoise de Graffigny and their radical responses to sexual violence. Neither simply a reaction to, nor collusion with, patriarchal and national literary forms but, rather, both, women’s writing offered an invitation to group membership through a literary project of self-transformation. In so doing, argues Cheek, women’s writing was the first modern literary category to capitalize transnationally on the virtue of identity, anticipating the global literary marketplace’s segmentation of affinity-based reading publics, and continuing to define women’s writing to this day.

Pamela L. Cheek is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of New Mexico and author of Sexual Antipodes: Enlightenment Globalization and the Placing of Sex.

c o n t e n t s

Preface

1  Networks of Women Writers, circa 1785–87
2  Two Quarrels
3  Ravishing and Romance Language
4  The Repertoire of the School for Girls
5  Heroines and Local Girls
6  Heroines in the World

Notes
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments

The volume focuses on materials produced before 1700, though the final essay addresses 18th-century trade cards. From Routledge:

Callan Davies, Hannah Lilley, and Catherine Richardson, eds., Practices of Ephemera in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 2023), 252 pages, ISBN: 978-0367528362 (hardback), $160 / ISBN: 978-1003058588 (ebook), $40.

This collection is the first to historicise the term ephemera and its meanings for early modern England and considers its relationship to time, matter, and place. It asks: how do we conceive of ephemera in a period before it was routinely employed (from the eighteenth century) to describe ostensibly disposable print? In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—when objects and texts were rapidly proliferating—the term began to acquire its modern association with transitoriness. But contributors to this volume show how ephemera was also integrally related to wider social and cultural ecosystems. Chapters explore those ecosystems and think about the papers and artefacts that shaped homes, streets, and cities or towns and their attendant preservation, loss, or transformation. The studies here therefore look beyond static records to think about moments of process and transmutation and accordingly get closer to early modern experiences, identities, and practices.

c o n t e n t s

Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Biographies

1  Introduction: Spawning

Concepts/ Emerging
2  Megan Heffernan — Expired Time: Archiving Waste Manuscripts
3  Anna Reynolds — What Do Texts and Insects Have in Common?; or, Ephemerality before Ephemera
3  Bruce Boehrer — Time’s Flies: Ephemerality in the Early Modern Insect World
4  Robert Bearman — What Is an ‘Ephemeral Archive’? Stratford-upon-Avon, 1550–1650: A Case Study
5  Alison Wiggins — Paper and Elite Ephemerality

Matter / Metamorphosing
6  Elaine Leong — Recipes and Paper Knowledge
7  Katherine Hunt — More Lasting than Bronze: Statues, Writing, and the Materials of Ephemera in Ben Jonson’s Sejanus His Fall
8  Hannah Lilley — Uncovering Ephemeral Practice: Itineraries of Black Ink and the Experiments of Thomas Davis
9  Helen Smith — Things That Last: Ephemerality and Endurance in Early Modern England

Environments / Buzzing
10  Michael Lewis — Toy Coach from London
11  Jemima Matthews — Maritime Ephemera in Walter Mountfort’s The Launching of the Mary
12  Callan Davies — Playing Apples and the Playhouse Archive
13  William Tullet — Extensive Ephemera: Perfumer’s Trade Cards in Eighteenth-Century England

From Thames & Hudson:

Julius Bryant, ed., The Art of the Illustrated Book: History and Design (London: Thames & Hudson, 2022), 288 pages, ISBN: 978-0500480694, £45 / $60.

This is the story of the illustrated book, from the earliest printed examples to the present day, told through the collections of the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London—a library that was created to bring together examples of superlative book-making on almost every subject. Gathered here are some of the most influential, compelling and striking examples of the illustrated book, arranged thematically in chapters devoted to subjects such as art, literature, religion, architecture, natural history, fashion, and shopping. Brimming with innovative and beautiful examples, ranging from well-known titles, such as Owen Jones’s Grammar of Ornament and James Audubon’s Birds of America, to other wonderful but less familiar publications, this collection offers a fascinating overview of some of the finest illustrated books ever created—demonstrating their enduring appeal.

Julius Bryant is the Emeritus Keeper of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

c o n t e n t s

Introduction
1  Religion
2  Natural History
3  Travel
4  Fables & Folk Tales
5  Literature
6  Art Making
7  Art History
8  Architecture
9  Ornament and Pattern
10  Festivals
11  World Fairs
12  Fashion
13  Shopping

Now available in paperback from Yale UP:

Margaret Willes, In the Shadow of St. Paul’s Cathedral: The Churchyard that Shaped London (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022), 320 pages, ISBN: 978-0300249835 (hardcover), $35 / ISBN: 978-0300273380 (paperback), $17.

The extraordinary story of St. Paul’s Churchyard—the area of London that was a center of social and intellectual life for more than a millennium

St. Paul’s Cathedral stands at the heart of London, an enduring symbol of the city. Less well known is the neighborhood at its base that hummed with life for over a thousand years, becoming a theater for debate and protest, knowledge, and gossip. For the first time Margaret Willes tells the full story of the area. She explores the dramatic religious debates at Paul’s Cross, the bookshops where Shakespeare came in search of inspiration, and the theater where boy actors performed plays by leading dramatists. After the Great Fire of 1666, the Churchyard became the center of the English literary world, its bookshops nestling among establishments offering luxury goods. This remarkable community came to an abrupt end with the Blitz. First the soaring spire of Old St. Paul’s and then Wren’s splendid Baroque dome had dominated the area, but now the vibrant secular society that had lived in their shadow was no more.

Margaret Willes, formerly publisher at the National Trust, is author of several books, including The Curious World of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, Reading Matters, and The Gardens of the British Working Class. She lives in London.

From Profile Books:

Roland Allen, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (London: Profile Books, 2023), 416 pages, ISBN: 978-1788169325, £25.

Diaries, sketchbooks, common-places, notebooks, ledgers, and ships’ logs: how the blank book changed the way we think, and helped us change the world. The first history of the notebook, a simple invention that changed the way the world thinks.

We see notebooks everywhere we go. But where did this simple invention come from? How did they revolutionise our lives, and why are they such powerful tools for creativity? And how can using a notebook help you change the way you think? In this wide-ranging story, Roland Allen reveals all the answers. Ranging from the bustling markets of medieval Florence to the quiet studies of our greatest thinkers, he follows a trail of dazzling ideas, revealing how the notebook became our most dependable and versatile tool for creative thinking. He tells the notebook stories of artists like Leonardo and Frida Kahlo, scientists from Isaac Newton to Marie Curie, and writers from Chaucer to Henry James. We watch Darwin developing his theory of evolution in tiny pocketbooks, see Agatha Christie plotting a hundred murders in scrappy exercise books, and learn how Bruce Chatwin unwittingly inspired the creation of the Moleskine. On the way we meet a host of cooks, kings, sailors, fishermen, musicians, engineers, politicians, adventurers, and mathematicians, who all used their notebooks as a space for thinking and to shape the modern world. In an age of AI and digital overload, the humble notebook is more relevant than ever. Allen shows how bullet points can combat ADHD, journals can ease PTSD, and patient diaries soften the trauma of reawakening from coma. The everyday act of moving a pen across paper can have profound consequences, changing the way we think and feel: making us more creative, more productive—and happier.

Roland Allen is a publisher and author who lives in Hove. He studied at Manchester University and works in book (and notebook) publishing. He has written about subjects as diverse as bicycles and bread, kept a diary for decades, and enjoys stationery a little too much.