Heroines and Local Girls

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[I]t certainly should be read, and because the coverage is remarkable, the book can be profitably read in parts. But to read the whole book has additional rewards, as Cheek interweaves familiar texts with a great many others that few of us have read to illuminate how networks of women writers in the long eighteenth century involved each other in literary projects of female identity. This book opens so many roads of discovery that we will profit from it for a long time.

" (Modern Language Quaterly) "This is a bold, risk-taking book. It is both theoretically engaged and admirable in scope and aims. In it, Pamela L. Cheek attempts a transnational history of women's writing in the long eighteenth century. She asks an important question: Where does 'women's writing' fit within the category of 'world literature'?...Heroines and Local Girls will remain an important touchstone for us all in the coming years, as we continue to explore writers across borders and write our literary histories anew." (Early Modern Women) "With her heroines and local girls, Pamela L. Cheek draws attention to two ways in which women could be textually related to the literary field in the long eighteenth century: by defining an aristocratic and cosmopolitan concept of gender identity oneself or, on the other hand, by being determined through a local experience of gender practice. This double definition actually enables Cheek to unfold a new map of literary history, making it possible for today's readers to see 'women's literature' at work as a vital critical category, but inviting us all along, also, to articulate its meaning for the women writers themselves in their own century. Cheek's argument is very compelling and makes us look at a number of well-known texts with fresh eyes. Her comparative reading of Charlotte Lennox with Françoise de Graffigny and that of Frances Burney with Mme de Staël are particularly stunning." (Women's Writing) "This impressive work presents a revelatory model of discussing networks that interconnects with transnationalism and the theoretical ramifications of interdependence, not only among different national literatures but especially among individual women writers. It clearly suggests the wealth of possibilities and trajectories that the study of women's writing offers, and it shows how a supple approach to national questions and traditions brings to the fore previously hidden lines of communication and conjunctions. Erudite and com pelling, Cheek's book, while addressing the long eighteenth century, is a lively model for studying complex patterns of influence, regardless of the specificities of individual disciplines." (Novel) "[Cheek's]book helpfully urges a broader, transnational evaluation of European writing that allows more encompassing conclusions about gender and the importance of literary production. It offers stimulus for future scholarship throughout, and its nuanced, networked picture of historical women's words and lives challenges the limits imposed by longstanding, nation-oriented academic structures." (The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats) "This deeply researched book provides a much-needed transnational history of the emergence of women's writing as a distinct body of literature through an analysis of both the writerly and readerly approaches that facilitate intra-sexual and textual community-building. It seeks to elucidate the strategies that favor the move from the identification of the individual female reader with a work of literature to the consolidation of a collective subsection of women's writing....This is a wide-ranging, meticulously detailed book that is densely packed with important insights." (Europe Now) "Pamela L. Cheek makes an extraordinarily important contribution not just to our understanding of women's writing but also to our thinking about the international circulation and reception of literary texts. Few scholars have anything like Cheek's range, and her ability to speak of the importance of translation without converting it into an easy alignment of one national dictionary with another marks her book with a combination of availability and precision. Heroines and Local Girls is indispensable reading for anyone interested in women's writing and how literature crosses national boundaries." (Frances Ferguson, University of Chicago)