Professor Sarah Prescott

Professor
BA (York), PhD (Exeter) Photograph of Professor Sarah Prescott.

Contact

Email: scp@aber.ac.uk
Office: D63
Phone: +44 (0)1970 622534

Teaching Areas

Sarah Prescott is a Professor of English Literature.

Sarah received a UWA Award for Teaching Excellence in 2005.

Her main teaching interests are in eighteenth-century literature, women’s writing, pre-1800 Welsh writing in English, feminist theory, detective fiction, and Welsh writing in English. Sarah has supervised a number of postgraduate dissertations on a range of topics, mostly in the area of eighteenth-century studies, and Welsh writing in English.  She is currently supervising PhD students in the following areas: eighteenth-century educational writing by women, Eliza Haywood and Platonism in the eighteenth century, Frieda Hughes and celebrity theory, Anglicisation and the writings of the Griffiths family of North Wales, women's writing from Wales. She would welcome research proposals for postgraduate study in any area of her expertise.

Sarah was on research leave in 2009/10 and Semester 1, 2010/11,  having received a British Academy Research Development Award.  Her book will be entitled 'Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Women's Writing from Wales: The Cambrian Muses'.  See News Archive.

Research

Sarah's main research has received external funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy and most recently the Leverhulme Trust, see below.  Her main research interests are in the area of eighteenth-century studies and include women’s poetry and fiction, pre-1800 Welsh writing in English, women's writing and Wales, authorship, feminist literary history and provincial literary culture.

Her current research interest is pre-1800 Welsh writing in English, particularly women's writing.  Her book on this topic Eighteenth-Century Writing from Wales: Bards and Britons was a runner-up for the 2009 Roland Mathias Prize for Welsh Writing in English.  In December 2011 Sarah was awarded £248,395 by The Leverhulme Trust for a three-year Research Project Grant on ‘Women’s Poetry 1400-1800 in English, Irish, Scots, Scots Gaelic and Welsh’. The study will provide a major new literary history of women's poetry in Ireland, Scotland and Wales from 1400 to 1800, covering poetry in Welsh, Gaelic, Scots, Scots Gaelic, Ulster Scots and English through a fully edited anthology with translations and an accompanying critical study. As Principal Applicant, Sarah will be working with fellow scholars Dr Sarah Dunnigan at the University of Edinburgh, Dr Marie-Louise Coolahan at the National University of Ireland, Galway, Dr Cathryn Charnell-White at the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, Aberystwyth and a further Research Assistant on Scots Gaelic to be appointed in 2012. The project will start in February 2013.

'Eighteenth-Century Writing from Wales has no rivals as an exploration of Anglophone writing in Wales in the period.  The intricacies and contradictions of a national identity in eighteenth-century Wales are explored in a new way for a readership alert to nuance rather than conformity, the uncertainties of Britain rather than its glories.  This is an important book.'(Murray Pittock)

'Eighteenth-Century Writing from Wales  is a brilliant, ground-breaking study of literature and cultural history.  Engaging with, but decisively qualifying, recent developments in historical scholarship that take the British-Irish archipelago as a single connected field, Sarah Prescott gives a Welsh accent to 'the new British history'.  This authoritative yet accessible book deserves the attention not just of scholarly specialists but of everyone with an interest in Wales and its cultural resources.' (John Kerrigan)

'[This] scholarly and insightful book is firmly positioned within the recent 'archipelagic' school of writing about the cultures of Wales, Scotland, Ireland and England.  Prescott argues convincingly that the neglect of Wales and Welsh culture had led to a serious misunderstanding of the dynamics of eighteenth-century conceptions of British identity.  Prescott's overall thesis offers a powerful challenge to Linda Colley's influential account of the forging of Britishness.' Times Literary Supplement

'This book is valuable not only for its major contribution to the recovery of eighteenth-century Welsh writing but also for its nuanced analysis of Welsh writers' stance on the "four nations" problem.' Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Her current book on Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Women's Writing from Wales includes chapters on Katherine Philips, Jane Brereton, Jane Cave, Anne Penny, Hester Lynch Piozzi, Anna Maria Bennett, Mary Robinson, Elizabeth Baker (Dolgellau).  

Additional Interests

Sarah is Director of the Centre for Women’s Writing and Literary Culture at Aberystwyth.  She was until recently acting Deputy Director of the Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Studies c1100-1800 (IMEMS), which is one of the five centres under the Aberystwyth University and Bangor University Research and Enterprise Partnership www.aber.ac.uk/en/research/research-enterprise/.   The Institute runs a fortnightly seminar series by video-link between Aberystwyth, Bangor and Swansea which attracts a range of international speakers. For further details on this year's seminar series and for information about the Institute click on the following links: http://www.bangor.ac.uk/english/ems/earlymod.htm and  http://www.bangor.ac.uk/english/medieval/home.htm.

Sarah is currently strand leader for the research group on 'Writing Wales' and organized a conference on Writing Wales, 1500-1800 in July 2008 at the National Library of Wales (with Stewart Mottram).

Staff Publications

Books

Writing Wales from the Renaissance to Romanticism edited by Stewart Mottram and Sarah Prescott (Ashgate forthcoming 2012)

Eighteenth-Century Writing from Wales: Bards and Britons (University of Wales Press 2008).  This book examines Welsh writing in English in the context of recent critical debates concerning the rise of cultural nationalism and the 'invention' of Great Britain in the eighteenth century.  The study investigates the ways in which Anglophone literature from and about Wales imagines the nation and its culture in a range of genres including poetry, fiction, letters and religious writing.  Its aim in particular is to gauge the extent to which Welsh writers approve, contest and/or shape emergent models of Britishness in the period.

Women, Authorship, and Literary Culture, 1690-1740 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), x + 237pp. The dominant model of female authorship in the period 1690-1740 is London-centred, professional and fiction-oriented. In this engaging study, Sarah Prescott argues that alternative contexts for publication and different models of authorship were equally influential in shaping women’s involvement in literary culture. In addition to acknowledging the impact of literary London on the careers, images and publication patterns of a variety of women writers, Prescott stresses the importance of provincial networks and non-metropolitan literary systems. The focus on alternative locations and contexts as influences on women writers does not mean that the commercial side of female authorship is neglected. Rather, women could use provincialism, and all it implied, as a way to shape their literary authority and market their work. This study provides an exciting and thought-provoking revision of our current conceptions of women’s participation in literary culture.

‘Prescott’s book successfully dismantles the arbitrary distinctions often drawn between professional and amateur, metropolitan and provincial, and scandalous and pious writers.’ Notes and Queries

‘In this work of detailed scholarship, common place assumptions about women being denied a place in literary culture are quietly but determinedly revised, with the result that new ways of looking and new chronologies are made possible.’ Women’s History Review

‘Fully cognizant of recent theoretical debates about gender and authorship, but confident in the findings of her own original research, Prescott makes an important contribution to literary histories of the early eighteenth century.’ The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

‘This is an astute, elegant, and lively book that will be necessary reading for scholars in the field.’ The Modern Language Review

Women and Poetry, 1660-1750, edited by Sarah Prescott and David E. Shuttleton (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), xiii + 258pp.  The period from the Restoration to the 1750s sees the emergence of women as professional poets. This new collection of commissioned essays provides an overview of all aspects of women’s poetic practice as they began their fraught negotiation of the public world of letters. Usefully divided into three sections, covering biographies of the leading poets, critical readings and cultural contexts, the poets discussed include Aphra Behn, Anne Killigrew, Jane Barker, Mary, Lady Chudleigh, Anne Finch, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Mary Leapor. The essays address questions of social status and public image, the shift from manuscript to print, exploitation in the literary marketplace, the use of classical and biblical models, politics, satire and the emergence of labouring-class women poets. The book features original contributions from Margaret J. M. Ezell, Germaine Greer, Jennifer Keith, Claudia Thomas Kairoff, Kathryn E. King, Donna Landry, Rebecca M. Mills, Valerie Rumbold, Jane Spencer, Carol Shiner Wilson and Susan Wiseman. This volume is the only critical anthology to address all aspects of women’s poetry in this period. 

Sarah has edited a special issue of Women's Writing (Vol. 7 No. 3).

Journal Articles

‘That private shade wherein my Muse was bred’: Katherine Philips and the Poetic Spaces of Welsh Retirement,’ Philological Quarterly 8.4 (2009 for 2011), 345-364

'Archipelagic Orinda?  Katherine Philips and theWriting of Welsh Women's Literary History', Literature Compass 6/6 (2009): 1167-1176

"Gray's Pale Spectre": Evan Evans, Thomas Gray and the rise of Welsh bardic nationalism, Modern Philology 104. 1 (August 2006): 72-95

'What Foes more dang'rous than too strong Allies?' The Society of Ancient Britons and Anglo-Welsh relations in eighteenth-century London', Huntington Library Quarterly 69.4 (December 2006): 535-554

'The Cambrian Muse:  Welsh Identity and Hanoverian Loyalty in the Poems of Jane Brereton' (1685-1740), Eighteenth-Century Studies, 38.4 (2005): 587-603

'Provincial Networks, Dissenting Connections and Noble Friends: Elizabeth Singer Rowe and Female Authorship in Early Eighteenth-Century England', Eighteenth-Century Life 25.1 (2001): 29-42

'Mary Chandler, Elizabeth Rowe and 'Ralph's Miscellany': Coincidental Biographical and Bibliographical Findings', Notes and Queries (with David Shuttleton): NS48.1(March 2001) 31-34

'The Debt to Pleasure: Eliza Haywood's Love in Excess and women's fiction of the 1720s'  Women's Writing 7.3 (2000): 427-445

'Prattling, Tattling and knowing everything: public authority and the female editorial persona in the early essay-periodical', British Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies (with Jane Spencer) 23.1 (2000): 43-57.

'Penelope Aubin and the Doctrine of Morality: a reassessment of the pious woman novelist', Women's Writing, 1.1 (1994): 99-112

'The Palace of Fame and the Problem of Reputation: the case of Eliza Haywood', Baetyl: The Journal of Women's Literature, vol. 4 (1994): 10-35

Contributions to Books

‘Anglophone Welsh Women’s Poetry 1750-1784: Jane Cave and Anne Penny,’ in The History of British Women’s Writing, 1750-1830, Volume Five, Edited by Jacqueline Labbe (Palgrave, forthcoming Sept. 2010)

‘Elizabeth Singer Rowe: Gender, Dissent and Whig Poetics’, in 'Cultures of Whiggism', New Essays on English Literature and Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century edited by David Womersley (Newark: The University of Delaware Press, 2005)

‘Elizabeth Singer Rowe (1674-1737): Politics, Passions and Piety’, in Women and Poetry, 1660-1750, edited by Sarah Prescott and David E. Shuttleton (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 71-78.

‘Aphra Behn: Poems’ in A Companion to Literature from Milton to Blake, edited by David Womersley (Blackwell, 2000), pp. 224-231

‘Eliza Haywood: Fantomina’ in A Companion to Literature from Milton to Blake, edited by David Womersley (Blackwell, 2000), pp. 277-283.