From Where I Sit: \u27They\u27 has Arrived at the Pronoun Party

Students are using new gender-inclusive terms, and academics have to catch on and catch up

From Where I Sit: The ABC of Tolerance and the \u27Alphabet Community.

Universities have a vital role to play in recognising complex sexualities

Matched Pairs: Gender and Intertextual Dialogue in Eighteenth-Century Fiction by Joseph F. Bartolomeo (review)

At first glance, this book, which is admittedly influenced by Ann Messenger’s His and Hers (1986), may conjure up images of monogrammed towels or jammies. Mr. Bartolomeo’s comparative approach across gender lines is, however, no gimmick. Rather, it is in the same spirit as his previous book, A New Species of Criticism, which argues that dialogue among and between authors and critics reflects inconsistencies that constantly remake the novel

The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy ed. by John Richetti (review)

Mr. Richetti has street cred. He makes another major contribution to the study of women writers with his edition of Haywood’s The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy (originally published in three volumes in 1753). Besides Garland’s 1974 facsimile, this marks the first modern edition—and the only edited, fully annotated version—of Haywood’s last novel

Writing for the Rising Generation: British Fiction for Young People 1672–1839 by Sylvia Kasey Marks (review)

Restoration and eighteenth-century juvenile fiction has been neglected if not derided. The only children’s literature from this period that most of us are familiar with was written by a handful of authors (known primarily for their other fiction), such as Bunyan,Wollstonecraft, Edgeworth, and Sarah Fielding. Throw in Goody Two-Shoes and Mother Goose, and call it good

From Where I Sit: Worker Bees are doing more for less of the honey

An academy built on low-wage, part-time staff will be a deficient and unworthy one

The Manufacturers of Literature: Writing and the Literary Marketplace in Eighteenth-Century England by George Justice (review)

Times have changed. In the mid 1980s, when I wrote my biography of John Almon, a study of the reflexive effect of politics on eighteenth-century booksellers and the literature that they published, there was only a handful of books on eighteenth-century print culture, and online research in the area was practically nonexistent. The basic resources were Wing’s Short-Title Catalogue (1945– 1951), which ends at 1700, and H. R. Plomer and E. R. Dix’s Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers (1932), which covers 1726–1775. Electronic library catalogues were in their infancy; Elisabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1980), Terry Belanger’s ‘‘Directory of the London Book Trade, 1766’’ (1977),William Todd’s Directory of Printers and Others in Allied Trades, London and Vicinity, 1800–1840 (1972), and the emerging online ESTC were as good as it got. Fast forward some fifteen years: The history of the book has become a hot topic

The New Foundling Hospital for Wit, ed. by Donald W. Nichol (review).

The New Foundling Hospital for Wit ran to six parts or volumes from 1768 to 1773. By turns clever, scurrilous, and bawdy, this collection was wildly popular in its own day, but has long been overlooked if not forgotten. Now, however, Mr. Nichol’s scholarly three-volume set makes the full run of this important collection of British satire widely accessible

Book of the Week: Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

Deborah Rogers is moved by a feminist scholar’s meditation on the body, medicine and mortality

Book of the week: Gothic Histories

Here be monsters, Deborah D. Rogers writes, and they\u27re fun