A New Republic of Women’s Letters

It is the assumption of this essay that literary study surrendered some of its most powerful interpretive tools when it allowed textual criticism and bibliography to be regarded as “preliminary” rather than integral to the study of literary work.

—Jerome J. McGann (1988)¹

This article seeks to probe mcgann’s extensive considerations of materiality, textuality, bibliography, and digital remediation as a means of resituating women within what he has termed “a new republic of letters.”² It does so not by addressing McGann’s substantial body of work on individual women writers—on Felicia Hemans, L. E. L., Mary Robinson, Ann Batten Cristall, and Christina Rossetti—but rather by extending McGann’s powerful insights into a consideration of how we as scholars can participate in the material transformation of the archive, in this case, the archive of women’s writing. Calling for a full implementation of McGann’s understanding that textual criticism and bibliography are “conceptually fundamental rather than preliminary to the study of literature,”³ this article seeks to establish that scholarly attention to female literary production, transmission, and preservation is imperative for the study of women’s literature. Although McGann’s comments are presented in gender-neutral terms, it is arguable that our attention to women writers is disproportionately impacted by the devaluing of textual studies and bibliography. McGann’s reorientation of attention from text to artifact, from linguistic to bibliographical codes, from product to process, from canon to archive, and from literary to book history provides a necessary foundation for resituating women within a new republic of letters.

McGann’s theoretical interventions as they relate to female authors have perhaps been most strongly felt by Early Modern textual scholars of women writers. Largely, this is because feminist scholars of this earlier period have had to contend with complex and messy textual artifacts, mediated practices of authorship, and collaborative models of production and circulation, for which McGann’s theories of social textuality (also known as the “new textualism”) have been immensely useful. In the later eighteenth century, when many more women began to print their writing, it might seem that we have more transparent and traceable methods of textual dissemination. But, as we are learning, the history of the circulation of women’s writing appears to be as complicated for women of our own period, given the wide variety of print and nonprint publication venues available to them. This essay asks how McGann’s theories of materiality can help us to understand the ways in which gender has shaped both the surviving archive of women’s writing and the scholarly uses of their archives, in the practices of bibliography and textual editing.

Canon and Archive

In “Philology in a New Key,” McGann draws upon Aleida Assmann’s distinction between two forms of cultural memory, canon and archive (see Figure 1).⁴ For Assmann, canon and archive provide two means of remembering, with the canon reflecting the cultural repository of “actively circulated memory” and the archive being home to “passively stored memory.”⁵ Assmann notes that “the archive may be recovered and reclaimed for the canon,” but she cautions that the canon necessarily occupies a finite cultural space.⁶ Feminist literary scholars, who have spent the last fifty years seeking to migrate women from archive to canon, have been all too aware of this finitude. One measure of the limits placed on canonicity is authorial selections in student anthologies like the Norton Anthology of English Literature. We know that the Norton, over its sixty years of existence, has increased its representation of Romantic women writers: the percentage of pages devoted to female authors of the Romantic period began, in 1962, at zero percent, and has risen, by 2012, to twenty-two percent, an increase in page numbers from zero to two hundred.⁷ However, the entirety of this increase is due to more pages being added to the anthology as whole; furthermore, over the same period of time, the number of pages devoted to male writers has also increased, from just under six-hundred pages to seven-hundred. In other words...