A new book edited by Jennifer Germann and Heidi Strobel, Materializing Gender in Eighteenth-Century Europe, has recently been published by Routledge. The collection was actually seen through the press by Ashgate USA’s Margaret Michniewicz, until Ashgate’s acquisition by Routledge. Margaret is now pursuing new projects as Bloomsbury’s Visual Arts/Art History Acquisitions Editor, and she tweets as @BburyViaAshg8. Expect some exciting announcements from her account soon.
Materializing Gender includes essays on the needle artist Mary Linwood (see her fantastic portrait of Napoleon at the V&A here), and almanacs, mantillas, guns and silver, amongst objects, as well as WSG member Felicity Roberts’ chapter on the eighteenth-century gentlewoman Mary Delany whose hybrid scientific and art practices included diary- and letter-writing, botanising, shellwork, collaging, needlework, and the writing of a novella. Felicity explores how Delany’s class and gender shaped her serious botanical interests, and how she expressed and shaped this complex subject position through her famous flower collages and novella. Felicity hopes to follow up her interest in Mary Delany with a wider study of women, natural history and material culture in the long eighteenth century soon. Beginning with Charlotte Smith’s ‘Beachy Head‘… what do readers think? What other ‘hybrid’ literary, art and scientific works are there in this period?
Women's Studies Group 1558 - 1837 