Jane Barker (1652-1732), English poet and novelist, is one of the most important women writers to enter the early modern literary marketplace. This book, the first full-length study of her writing career, draws upon archival sources to reconstruct Barker's beginnings as a manuscript poet, expose the Catholic-Jacobite underpinnings of her best-known fiction, trace her passage into print, and explore connections between her literary imaginings and the national life. It will be valuable to students of manuscript culture, the early marketplace, and the interplay of politics, religion, literature, and gender in the Augustan period. The study also makes a significant contribution to feminist literary historiography, showing how women writers can be approached not only through feminist models of difference but also through more inclusive models of women's involvement in early modern culture.

About the Author
Kathryn King is Associate Professor of English, University of Montevallo, Alabama

Reviews
... fine book ... Barker emerges from King's study as an old-fashioned and multiply contradictory woman, a long-lived contemporary of Shadwell and Dryden, yet a person who even in old age, poverty, and blindness was alert to change and able to turn at least some aspects of it to her own advantage ... reveals Barker a writer who is marginal in so many ways that she becomes central. * The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual *



Book Information
ISBN 9780198187028
Author Kathryn King
Format Hardback
Page Count 280
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 468g
Dimensions(mm) 224mm * 145mm * 21mm