Rationale for Feminist Bibliography

Abstract

This essay posits a framework of shared identity and practice for feminist bibliographers, book historians, and textual scholars. Feminist bibliographyis positioned as the use of bibliographic methodologies to revise how book history and related fields categorize and analyze women’s texts and labor. The opening section of the essay quantitatively analyzes book history companions, readers, and introductions to establish a baseline for how the field functions as a practice and discourse. The second section then analyzes the version of bibliography that has been canonized in book history, identifies how book history has explicitly favored a version of bibliography that is antagonistic to feminist work, and proposes a feminist narrative of bibliography that can and should be incorporated as the foundation for studies of the material book. The last section puts a feminist framework into practice and searches for women’s contributions to bibliographic labor in the Anglo-American world. It offers a new set of founders in bibliography and challenges contemporary bibliographers and book historians to re-evaluate on whom we place importance, how we define interpretive scholarship, and how we construct our discourse.

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