Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies
Special Issue: "New Approaches to Eliza Haywood: The Political Biography and Beyond"
Patsy Fowler and Amanda Hiner
September 23, 2013; November 13, 2013

For nearly three centuries, written accounts of Eliza Haywood's (1693? – 1756) life and literary career have been constructed out of scraps of disinformation, misinformation, and remnants of aggressive literary and personal insults. Haywood's earliest biographers and critics often embellished the scanty written records of Haywood's life and career, introducing factual errors and misrepresentations into the written accounts of her life and literary career – errors which have been repeated by critics well into the twenty-first century. Despite the work of Patrick Spedding, Christine Blouch, Mary Anne Schofield, and other recent scholars, Haywood's birth date and even her family origins remain uncertain. The disconcerting mixture of truth and falsehood pervading Haywood's written biographies and negatively inflecting her literary reputation has left scholars unsure of how to locate Haywood within the canon of important eighteenth-century writers and has obscured her role as an important political writer, social critic, and satirist.
Over the past several decades, feminist scholars have successfully reclaimed Haywood as a legitimate literary subject. Kathryn King's 2012 A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood considerably advances these critical exercises, providing readers with the first full-length biography of Haywood in almost a century and offering readers a serious and attentive examination of Haywood's fearless political engagement in the public sphere. Her political biography of Eliza Haywood changes the very nature of the discussions scholars can have about this important literary figure in the future and mitigates the public perception of Haywood as merely a scandalous, feminized, amatory, and minor novelist. And, though King's political biography properly emphasizes Haywood's less scrutinized political tracts, scandal chronicles, and periodicals, it also instantiates ways of seeing and interpreting Haywood's popular novels as vehicles for political and social critique.

This special edition of the Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies seeks scholarly papers which both follow and advance recent efforts to reexamine and reconceptualize Haywood's literary career, including her role in the literary marketplace, her political writings, her political fiction or nonfiction, her use of satire, her inclusion of political elements in her novels, or her collaboration with male political writers. We welcome submissions that explore these or any related areas of focus from diverse disciplinary or theoretical angles, as well as papers which seek to locate and examine Haywood's works within new historical, political, or social contexts.

This Special Issue of the Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies is guest edited by Patsy Fowler and Amanda Hiner. Please submit paper proposals of no more than 500 words by December 1, 2013 to Amanda Hiner, hinera@winthrop.edu. For information on paper submissions please consult the JEMCS website at http://jemcs.pennpress.org/strands/jemcs/home.htm;jsessionid=48367C09624....