Isobel Grundy

The feminist companion to literature in English : women writers from the Middle Ages to the present

An international guide to women writers in English, featuring both well-known and obscure women writers from the British Isles and North America as well as writers from the Caribbean, the South Pacific, Australia, Asia and Africa. It includes not only poets, dramatists and novelists, but also diarists, translators and spiritual autobiographers. Most entries are biographical but there are numerous topic entries as well.

Intertextual Encoding in the Writing of Women's Literary History

This paper explores theoretical and practical aspects of intertextuality, in relation to the highly interpretative tag within the SGML tagset developed by the Orlando Project for its history of womens writing in the British Isles. Arguing that the concept of intertextuality is both crucial to and poses particular challenges to the creation of an encoding scheme for literary historical text, it outlines the ways in which the projects tags address broader issues of intertextuality. The paper then describes the specific tag in detail, and argues on the basis of provisional results drawn from the Orlando Projects textbase that despite the impossibility of tracking intertextuality exhaustively or devising a tagset that completely disambiguates the concept, this tag provides useful pathways through the textbase and valuable departure points for further inquiry. Finally, the paper argues that the challenges to notions of rigour posed by the concept of intertextuality can help us fruitfully to examine some of the suppositions (gendered and other) that we bring to electronic text markup.

Trash, Trumpery, and Idle Time: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Fiction

Several different studies might be written under my subtitle. A full evaluation of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu as fiction-writer must await examination of her unpublished, unread romance writings. Another approach would involve enumeration and evaluation of the books she owned.1 In neither of these studies would the novel occupy the central position which it tends to assume in literary history. Montagus writings span a rich diversity of fictional forms, but exclude the novel proper. In her library the new novel (to use a tautology) jostles for space with canonical works (her canon: non-fiction in Latin and several modern languages) and with often very obscure non-novelistic fiction in French and English. This essay will say something of her practice as a writer of fiction, and more about her acquisition of books, but it will focus on her criticism of the novels of the 1740s and 1750s. This project too demands an adjustment of critical viewpoint which repositions the canonical novelists into a less commanding position than we are used to. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who was not a novelist, also does not feature in Indiana University Presss forthcoming anthology of women

Preface: Writing and Reading the ‘Rugged Realities of Life’

Definitions of both mental health and migration are ambiguous and contested, and any attempt to integrate the two phenomena is fraught with the challenge of comprehending and interpreting such constantly moving targets. The difficulties are not confined to changes over time and space, but involve many different understandings of the criteria for ‘normality’ and multiple perceptions of migration. Nevertheless, there is sufficient evidence of a perceived link between migration and mental illness to warrant a multidisciplinary evaluation, blending conceptual and empirical models and covering a broad chronological, spatial and thematic spectrum.