Across disciplines, languages, and nations: Recent scholarship on Mary Wollstonecraft

Abstract

In the last 4 decades, Mary Wollstonecraft has been brought from the margins of Western literary history to assume her place as a feminist foremother, radical icon, and familiar meme. As the range of disciplinary responses to Wollstonecraft's writing expands, our knowledge is deepening of her intellectual landscapes and her local and transnational networks. Diversification of expertise has also led to closer, interdisciplinary scrutiny of her works, including texts that have previously suffered neglect because of their apparent irrelevance to her feminism. Researchers increasingly recognise her transnational outlook, and this recognition has prompted intersectional reflections on her feminist legacy in the wake of Brexit and Black Lives Matter. A growing body of criticism is also revising the longstanding myth of her posthumous invisibility after the publication of Godwin's Memoirs, drawing attention to the persistent engagement with her works by key thinkers during the nineteenth century as well as her multiple afterlives in translation.