Book Review – RETRACTED – Pamela L. Cheek. Heroines and Local Girls: The Transnational Emergence of Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century. Haney Foundation Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Pp. 270. $79.95 (cloth). doi: 10.1017/jbr.2020.238

Eighteenth-Century Women’s Writing and the Methodist Media Revolution argues that Methodism in the eighteenth century was a media event that uniquely combined and utilized different types of media to reach a vast and diverse audience. Specifically, it traces specific cases of how evangelical and Methodist discourse practices interacted with major cultural and literary events during the long eighteenth-century, from the rise of the novel to the Revolution controversy of the 1790’s to the shifting ground for women writers leading up to the Reform era in the 1830’s. The book maps the religious discourse patterns of Methodism onto works by authors like Samuel Richardson, Mary Wollstonecraft, Hannah More, Elizabeth Hamilton, Mary Tighe, and Felicia Hemans. This not only provides a better sense of the religious nuances of these authors’ better-known works, but also provides a fuller consideration of the wide variety of genres women were writing in during the period, many of which continue to be read as ‘non-literary’. The scope of the book leads the reader from the establishment of evangelical forms of discourse in the 1730’s to the natural ends of these discourse structures during the era of reform, all the while pointing to ways in which women—Methodist and otherwise—modified these discourse patterns as acts of resistance or subversion.

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Hunting the Methodist Vixen

Eighteenth-Century Women's Writing and the Methodist Media Revolution ◽

10.3828/liverpool/9781789620184.003.0001 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 1-27

Author(s):

Andrew O. Winckles

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Conceptual Framework ◽

Women's Writing ◽

Mary Wollstonecraft ◽

Felicia Hemans ◽

Evangelical Women ◽

Long Eighteenth Century ◽

British Culture ◽

Women’S Writing

Chapter One lays out the broad conceptual stakes of the book’s argument, reviews the existing literature on Methodism, Romanticism, and women’s writing, and points to some of the modes of analysis that are pursued in the rest of the book. Furthermore, it lays out the rationale for examining women like Mary Wollstonecraft and Felicia Hemans, who would not have identified as evangelicals, in the context of evangelical women. The goal is not to trace influence, necessarily, but instead to examine how evangelical discourse came to permeate many different aspects of British culture. More broadly speaking this chapter explores of the stakes of the volume and lays out a conceptual framework for understanding how specific changes to the protocols of mediation that Methodists in general, and Methodist women in particular, pioneered can be mapped onto women’s writing more broadly during the long eighteenth-century.

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