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The special issue of Partial Answers devoted to British women writers is organized around the theme of marginalia, a concept that shifts attention away from the commonplace critical understanding of “margin” as merely an indicator of status and toward the intellectual work that occurs within it. The relation of “margin” to “center” articulates the position that women authors have historically occupied vis-à-vis a male tradition of literary creation; however, the margin is also a space of possibility that invites women authors to enter into an intellectual exchange with this tradition and to generate their own responses to it. The introduction surveys the essays collected in the issue as reflecting in different ways on the complex literary and discursive effects of women’s liminal locations.
Yael Shapira is a lecturer in the English Department of Bar-Ilan University. Her research interests include eighteenth-century English fiction and cultural history, the Gothic and the history of popular publishing. She is currently completing a book on the representation of the dead body in the eighteenth-century English novel and beginning a new research project focused on forgotten female Gothic novelists of the 1790s.
Updated on September 15, 2016.
June 2010:
Miranda M. Yaggi is a PhD candidate at Indiana University, Bloomington, specializing in the 18th- and 19th-century British novel and women writers. She is at work on her dissertation, "Architects of a Genre: Literati, Critics, and the British Novel's Critical Institution," which revises the traditional narrative that features print-journalism at the heart of the novel's "rising" professional institution and proposes, instead, to account for the early institution's heterogeneric and heteroglossic nature.