The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace 1678-1730

The period 1678-1730 was a decisive one not only in Western political history but also in the history of the British press. Changing conditions for political expression and an expanding book trade enabled unprecedented opportunities for political activity. The Women of Grub Street argues that women already at work in the London book trade were among the first to seize those new opportunities for public political expression. Synthesizing areas of scholarly inquiry previously regarded as separate, and offering a new model for the study of the literary marketplace, The Women of Grub Street examines not only women writers, but also printers, booksellers, ballad-singers, hawkers, and other producers and distributors of printed texts. Original both in its sources and in the claims it makes for the nature, extent, and complexities of women's participation in print culture and public politics, it provides a wealth of new information about middling and lower-class women's political and literary lives, and shows that these women were not merely the passive distributors of other people's political ideas. The central argument of the book is that women of the widest possible variety of socioeconomic backgrounds and religio-political allegiances in fact played so prominent a role in the production and transmission of political ideas through print as to belie simultaneous powerful claims that women had no place in public life. R The first full-length study to suggest the degree of involvement of women in the entire process of print creation at this important moment, The Women of Grub Street supports a number of important revisionary arguments with a broad range of literary and archival evidence. It will be of interest to readers of literature, social and publishing history, women's studies and feminism, and the history of democracy and public discourse.

Literature & Fiction

McDowell, Paula

British & Irish

Clarendon Press

Original both in its sources and in the claims it makes for the nature, extent, and complexities of women's participation in print culture and public politics, this book provides a wealth of new information about middle- and lower-class women's political and literary lives, and shows that these women were not merely the passive distributors of other people's political ideas. Quite to the contrary, women of the widest possible variety of socioeconomic backgrounds and religio-political allegiances played so prominent a role in the production and transmission of political ideas through print as to belie simultaneous powerful claims that women had no place in public life.

Just as today’s embrace of the digital has sparked interest in the history of print culture, so in eighteenth-century Britain the dramatic proliferation of print gave rise to urgent efforts to historicize different media forms and to understand their unique powers. And so it was, Paula McDowell argues, that our modern concepts of oral culture and print culture began to crystallize, and authors and intellectuals drew on older theological notion of oral tradition to forge the modern secular notion of oral tradition that we know today. Drawing on an impressive array of sources including travel narratives, elocution manuals, theological writings, ballad collections, and legal records, McDowell re-creates a world in which everyone from fishwives to philosophers, clergymen to street hucksters, competed for space and audiences in taverns, marketplaces, and the street. She argues that the earliest positive efforts to theorize "oral tradition," and to depict popular oral culture as a culture (rather than a lack of culture), were prompted less by any protodemocratic impulse than by a profound discomfort with new cultures of reading, writing, and even speaking shaped by print. Challenging traditional models of oral versus literate societies and key assumptions about culture’s ties to the spoken and the written word, this landmark study reorients critical conversations across eighteenth-century studies, media and communications studies, the history of the book, and beyond.

The Invention of the Oral: Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices in Eighteenth-Century Britain

University of Chicago Press

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Self-Help

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Metz, Sabrina

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Motivational

Independently published

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