Gender and Genre

This series is dedicated to publishing intellectually innovative and diverse studies on the relationship between gender and genre from the Renaissance to the contemporary.

Studies on women as authors or readers have regularly sought to negotiate the issue of genre in interpreting gendered forms of writing and reading. Are there historically specific types of publication that speak to different genders? Is there such a thing as a woman’s or man’s text? And how consciously do writers across historical periods play with the seemingly gendered conventions of specific modes of writing? This series opens up the study of the particularity of gender in relation to the aesthetic forms and media used by writers across different periods.

Audrey Bilger is the Faculty Director of the Center for Writing and Public Discourse, and Professor of Literature at Claremont McKenna College. She is the author of Laughing Feminism: Subversive Comedy in Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen and editor of Jane Collier’s 1753 Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting for Broadview Literary Texts. She is coeditor of the Seal Press anthology Here Come the Brides! Reflections on Lesbian Love and Marriage.

Ann Heilmann is a Professor of English at Cardiff University, UK. Previously she was at the University of Hull where she established the Centre for Victorian Studies in 2009 and acted as its Director until 2011. She specializes in Victorian to contemporary literature and gender. The author of New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First-Wave Feminism (Palgrave, 2000), New Woman Strategies: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner and Mona Caird (Manchester UP, 2004), and Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, with Mark Llewellyn), she has edited four anthologies and three essay collections, including Feminist Forerunners (Pandora, 2003) and New Woman Hybridities: Femininity, Feminism, and International Consumer Culture, 1880–1930 (with Margaret Beetham, Routledge, 2004). Other edited work includes a scholarly edition of The Collected Short Stories of George Moore (Pickering & Chatto, 2007) and an essay collection on Metafiction and Metahistory in Contemporary Women’s Writing (Palgrave 2007), both with Mark Llewellyn, with whom she is now working on a co-authored monograph and essay collection on George Moore.

Mark Llewellyn is John Anderson Research Leadership Chair in English at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. His research interests are focused on the nineteenth century and contemporary literature and culture. His publications include the edition The Collected Short Stories of George Moore: Gender and Genre (with Ann Heilmann; Pickering & Chatto, 2007), and the collections Metafiction and Metahistory in Contemporary Women's Writing (with Ann Heilmann; Palgrave, 2007) and Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature (with Dinah Birch; Palgrave, 2010). Mark's most recent book is the co-authored (with Ann Heilmann) Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave, 2010). He is currently completing a book project on Incest in English Culture, 1835–1908.

Johanna M Smith is Associate Professor of English and Associate Chair of Undergraduate Studies at the University of Texas, Arlington, USA. Her research interests cover literature and drama of the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well as colonial and post-colonial literature, women’s studies, Marxism and critical theory. Books include Mary Shelley: Frankenstein (ed., Bedford-St. Martin, 2d ed 2000), Life-Writings by British Women 1660–1815: An Anthology (co-edited with Carolyn A Barros, Northeastern UP, 2000) and Mary Shelley (Twayne, 1996). She is currently working on a project entitled Interventions: British Women and/in the Public Sphere 1762–1866.

Margaret Stetz is the Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women’s Studies and Professor of Humanities at the University of Delaware, where she teaches courses on women and war, women’s material culture, women and comedy, the history of Women’s Studies, women and theatre, lesbian studies, and on Victorian and Neo-Victorian literature. Her books include British Women's Comic Fiction, 1890–1990 (2001), Gender and the London Theatre, 1880–1920 (2004), and Facing the Late Victorians (2007). She is co-author with Mark Samuels Lasner of England in the 1880s: Old Guard and Avant-Garde (1989) and England in the 1890s: Literary Publishing at the Bodley Head (1990). She is also the co-editor with Bonnie B. C. Oh of Legacies of the Comfort Women of World War II (2001) and co-editor with Cheryl Wilson of ‘Michael Field’ and Their World (2007). Her next book, Oscar Wilde, New Women, the Bodley Head and Beyond is forthcoming in Rivendale Press’s ‘Essays in Print Culture’ series.

We invite submissions from established scholars and first-time authors alike. Prospective authors should send a detailed proposal with a rationale, chapter outlines and at least two sample chapters alongside a brief author's biography and an anticipated submission date.

For detailed information on submitting a proposal, please click here.

Please contact either Mark Pollard, Publishing Director (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ) or Ann Heilmann (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ) for preliminary review.