This is the first ever complete critical edition of the writings of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661–1720), including work printed in her lifetime and material left in manuscript form at her death. Textual analysis, based on print and manuscript copies in repositories across the United Kingdom and United States, reveals her revision processes and uses of manuscript and print. Extensive commentary clarifies her techniques, sources, contexts, and diction. A detailed essay traces the history of her works' reception and transmission. The result is a complete view of her achievements that will promote more accurate assessments of her contributions to literary and cultural shifts, including perspectives on literary value, women's equality, religion, and affairs of state. Writer and critic of the Glorious Revolution, Finch imparts rare insights into this watershed of political and cultural values. Her work represents a complex convergence of artistic innovation, political allegiance, and personal passion.
- The first ever complete, critical edition of the works of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661–1720)
- Provides established texts of all Finch's poems, plays, and letters, organized by their appearance in Finch's authorized collections
- Includes a comprehensive introduction, extensive explanatory notes and thorough textual commentary
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Reviews & endorsements
'The attention to Finch's accomplishments and the notes about the events and personages mentioned in the works result in a resource that offers a unique understanding of Finch's status in her own time. The documentation alone makes it valuable to serious students and scholars of 18th-century literature.' M. H. Kealy, Choice
'The two-volume Cambridge Edition of the Works of Anne Finch: Countess of Winchelsea allows us to imagine an alternative Age of Finch. The editors, Claudia Kairoff and Jennifer Keith, have completed with astonishing thoroughness, sensitivity, and seriousness one of the landmark pieces of eighteenth-century scholarship of this century … Against centuries of incomplete attention to Finch, Keith and Kairoff have “redeemed” her in a triumphant act of feminist intervention and recovery.' Andrew Black, Digital Defoe
'Jennifer Keith and her coeditors, as well as Cambridge University Press, are to be applauded for this monumental editorial achievement. A new generation of scholars can now access Finch's works in this authoritative edition with extensive textual and explanatory notes and compare the manuscript and published versions. In doing so, they can begin to place Finch in the context of her literary predecessors, both male and female, and contemporaries, such as the Jacobite Jane Barker.' Mihoko Suzuki, Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal
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Product details
- Date Published: May 2021
- format: Multiple copy pack
- isbn: 9780521196222
- length: 1400 pages
- dimensions: 223 x 143 x 100 mm
- weight: 2.38kg
- availability: In stock
Table of Contents
Volume 1: List of illustrations
Preface and acknowledgments
Chronology
Abbreviations
Note
General introduction Claudia Thomas Kairoff, Jennifer Keith and Jean I. Marsden
Textual introduction Jennifer Keith
Account of the texts Jennifer Keith
Works excluded from this edition Molly Hand and Jennifer Keith
From Poems on Several Subjects written by Ardelia (The Northamptonshire Manuscript)
Miscellany Poems with Two Plays by Ardelia (The Folger Manuscript)
Some Pieces out of the First Act of the Aminta of Tasso
The Triumphs of Love and Innocence: A Tragecomedy
Aristomenes, or the Royal Shepheard: A Tragedy
Additional Poems Cheifly upon Subjects Devine and Moral
Explanatory and textual notes
List of source copies
Select bibliography
Index of titles
Index of first lines. Volume 2: List of illustrations
Preface and acknowledgments
Chronology
Abbreviations
Note
General introduction Claudia Thomas Kairoff and Jennifer Keith
Textual introduction Jennifer Keith
Account of the texts Jennifer Keith and R. Carter Hailey
From Miscellany Poems, on Several Occasions
The Wellesley Manuscript
Additional Poems
Explanatory and textual notes
Correspondence
A reception and transmission history of Finch's work: illustrative cases from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries Rachel Bowman
List of source copies
Select bibliography
Index of titles
Index of first lines.
Author
Anne Finch
Editors
Jennifer Keith, University of North Carolina, Greensboro
Jennifer Keith is an Associate Professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where she has taught since 1997. She is the author of Poetry and the Feminine from Behn to Cowper (2005) and numerous essays on poetry from the Restoration to the Romantic era. With the staff of the University Libraries at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro she developed The Anne Finch Digital Archive, an open-access site that supplements this edition. Keith and Claudia Thomas Kairoff were awarded a long-term fellowship by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Folger Shakespeare Library for work on this edition. Keith also received a three-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities Scholarly Editions and Translations Grant for this critical edition and the digital archive. She is a member of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
Claudia Thomas Kairoff, Wake Forest University, North Carolina
Claudia Thomas Kairoff is Professor of English at Wake Forest University, where she has taught since 1986. She is the author of Alexander Pope and his Eighteenth-Century Women Readers (1994) and Anna Seward and the End of the Eighteenth Century (2012), and co-editor, with Catherine Ingrassia, of 'More Solid Learning': New Critical Perspectives on Alexander Pope's Dunciad (2000). She has written numerous articles and book chapters on Pope and on women poets. Kairoff and Jennifer Keith were awarded a long-term fellowship by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Folger Shakespeare Library for work on this edition. She is a member of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and of the Southeastern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
Contributors
Claudia Thomas Kairoff, Jennifer Keith, Jean I. Marsden, Molly Hand, R. Carter Hailey