Feminist Comedy argues that the development of modern feminist thought is closely linked to theatrical comedy. Through analysis of plays by Catherine Clive, Frances Brooke, Frances Burney, Hannah Cowley, and Elizabeth Inchbald, the book demonstrates that these authors turned to comedy as a site of feminist critique, practice, and experimentation.
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Objects of Liberty explores the prevalence of souvenirs in six British women’s travel accounts of the French Revolution and Napoleonic era. Using a methodology informed by literary, gender, and material culture studies, it argues that women writers employed the souvenir to circulate political ideas and contribute to conversations about individual and national identity.

A Genealogy of the Gentleman argues that eighteenth-century women writers made key interventions in modern ideals of masculinity and authorship through narrative constructions of the gentleman in courtship novels. This codification of the gentleman allowed women authors to carve out a space for their literary authority not by overtly opposing their male critics and society’s patriarchal structure, but by rewriting the persona of the gentleman as a figure whose very desirability and hegemonic power were dependent on women’s influence.
 

This book identifies the prostitute memoir as a subgenre of the eighteenth-century French libertine novel and explores how the fictional utopia the narrators of these salacious pseudo-memoirs undermine the patriarchal hierarchies of the Ancien Régime and propose a social model in which women form networks of mutual support to achieve wealth and personal satisfaction.

The Visionary Queen argues that sixteenth-century noblewoman Marguerite de Navarre is more than a French author, political figure, or non-schismatic religious reformer. She is a visionary, as demonstrated in her efforts to better society, especially for women, in her literary writings (notably the Heptaméron), in her writings’ responses to her male contemporaries, and in the symbolism of the labyrinth reflected in her life and works.

Written by a combination of established scholars and new critics in the field, the essays collected in Circuit of Apollo attest to the vital practice of commemorating women’s artistic and personal relationships. In doing so, they illuminate the complexity of female friendships and honor as well as the robust creativity and intellectual work contributed by women to culture in the long eighteenth century.