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Review: Rural Life in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry

peoples, and the beginnings of slavery. From this perspective a wide range of literary texts of the period from both female and male authors are scrutinized afresh, and the conflictual elements in recent feminist writing which race provokes probed. Ania Loomba highlights both the tensions and the parallels between Shakespearean and post-colonial studies in India, rejects readings of Shakespeare that see him as 'emblematic of Western culture and therefore pleasurable', and insists on the freedom to respond to Shakespeare or any other text in multiple ways. Feminist theory here has an important role to play. She is sharply critical of both the post-structuralists and the new historicists for neglecting women. Women and Third World critics have been increasingly disturbed, she claims, by the implications of recently fashionable assumptions and methods of the West. Lydia Boose asks how in Elizabethan and Jacobean England when almost universal contempt for foreigners of any kind existed, one can isolate notions of race. In the sixteenth century it is at least questionable whether skin colour was the most defining feature of 'otherness'. Yet by the mid seventeenth-century when England was possibly the largest slave-trader in the world 'blackness' had become the most important factor. Natalie Zemon Davis explores the 'similarities and differences in the situation and views of Iroquois women in the area of Quebec and Mother Marie Guyant de I'Incarnation and her sister Ursulines who arrived in Quebec in 1639 at the time of France's penetration of the area. Using travel journals, Jesuit and other writings including those of Marie, ethnographic studies and Amerindian folklore, she explores the sexual division of labour in their agriculture, women's property rights, kinship structures, marriage and sexual practices, as well as religious ideas, which she suggests may be 'a source of alternative examples and metaphors to illumine the European case'. In accounts of the conquest of the Americas there has been little about the way in which indigenous women, in the face of attempts to erase their culture, sometimes fought back. Irene Silverblatt writes of the Spanish conquest of the Incas in the Peruvian Andes where women played a key role in keeping their culture alive despite the assaults against it. The gendered ideologies of the Spanish colonists upset traditional relations of reciprocity between the sexes. In the process women's property rights were restricted, their participation in political life constrained and both their labour and their sexuality were exploited. Verena Stokke investigates the way in which ideas of pure blood brought by the conquerors were transformed in the process of colonization. As 'new socially discriminated groups' were identified in the colonies a 'social hierarchization ... on explicitly racial criteria' crystallised. There is much, much more. The consistently thought-provoking contributions make this essential reading for both historians and literature specialists.