This book examines the poems of three Englishwomen--washerwoman Mary Collier, middle-class feminist polemicist Mary Scott, Bristol milkwoman Ann Yearsley, and Scottish dairywoman from Ayrshire, Janet Little. It questions how national identity might have influenced gender and class affiliations, and, reciprocally, how gender might have determined a nationalist impulse, particularly as it played out during the revolutionary period (1770-1800) in which most of the texts were written.

This book provides a much needed grouping of Latin-American women, emphasizing their differences--the diversity of their cultural backgrounds, socio-economic conditions, and literary strategies--as well as their commonalities. Humble writers of the Spanish and Portuguese testimonio and sophisticated postmodernist authors alike are contextualized within a "matriheritage of founding discourses."

This pathbreaking collection engages in the important new work of rediscovering the hundreds of British women writing during the Romantic period, women who we now realize were central, not marginal, to the poetics and ideologies of Romanticism. Yet no previous volume has focused on British women's responses to the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, or on their participation in the social, economic, religious, and poetic debates surrounding these political conflicts. As the first book to represent the full spectrum of women's participation in the Revolutionary debates, Rebellious...