This important new collection explores representations of late seventeenth- through mid-nineteenth-century transatlantic women travelers across a range of historical and literary works. While at one time transatlantic studies concentrated predominantly on men’s travels, this volume highlights the resilience of women who ventured voluntarily and by force across the Atlantic—some seeking mobility, adventure, knowledge, wealth, and freedom, and others surviving subjugation, capture, and enslavement. The essays gathered here concern themselves with the fictional and the historical, national and geographic location, racial and ethnic identities, and the configuration of the transatlantic world in increasingly taught texts such as The Female American and The Woman of Colour, as well as less familiar material such as Merian’s writing on the insects of Surinam and Falconbridge’s travels to Sierra Leone. Intersectional in its approach, and with an afterword by Eve Tavor Bannet, this essential collection will prove indispensable as it provides fresh new perspectives on transatlantic texts and women’s travel therein across the long eighteenth century.
 

This pathbreaking collection features original essays by leading scholars working at the intersections of women’s literary history, book history, and media cultures. Drawing on underexplored archives and innovative methodologies—from feminist bibliography to digital humanities—the contributors generate new narratives about the long eighteenth century and the centrality of gender to its literary production. Moving beyond a narrow focus on authorship, the chapters recover women as writers and readers, editors and curators, printers and book owners, scholars, preachers, and political actors. Across print, manuscript, and oral cultures, they illuminate the collaborative networks and material conditions shaping cultural production and circulation. Organized into sections on print histories, manuscript cultures, and new methodological approaches, this collection reshapes eighteenth-century studies while modeling ethically engaged archival research. Accessible and wide-ranging, it will appeal to scholars and students in literary studies, women’s and gender studies, and book history alike.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.