Download or read book Masking and Unmasking the Female Mind written by Mary Anne Schofield and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work concentrates on how eighteenth-century feminine novelists articulate the concerns important to women's lives and fates, and argues that these novelists used their romances to combat the controlling ideologies of the age.
Download or read book The English Novel Vol I written by Richard W. F. Kroll and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-21 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The English Novel, Volume I:1700 to Fielding collects a series of previously-published essays on the early eighteenth-century novel in a single volume, reflecting the proliferation of theoretical approaches since the 1970s. The novel has been the object of some of the most exciting and important critical speculations, and the eighteenth-century novel has been at the centre of new approaches both to the novel and to the period between 1700 and 1750. Richard Kroll's introduction seeks to frame the contributions by reference to the most significant critical discussions. These include: the question of whether and how we can talk about the 'rise' of the novel; the vexed question of what might constitute a novel; the relationship between the novel and possibly competing genres such as history or the romance; the relationship between early male writers like Defoe and popular novels by women in the early eighteenth century; the general ideological role played by novels relative to eighteenth-century culture (are they means of ideological conscription or liberation?); poststructuralist analyses of identity and gender; and the emergence of sentimental and domestic codes after Richardson. Since the modern European novel is often thought to have been formed in this period, these debates have clear implications for students of the novel in general as well as for those interested in the early enlightenment. Headnotes place each essay within the map of these wider concerns, and the volume offers a useful further reading list. Taken as a whole, this collection encapsulates the state of criticism at the present moment.
Download or read book The History of British Women s Writing 1750 1830 written by J. Labbe and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-08-20 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This period witnessed the first full flowering of women's writing in Britain. This illuminating volume features leading scholars who draw upon the last 25 years of scholarship and textual recovery to demonstrate the literary and cultural significance of women in the period, discussing writers such as Austen, Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley.
Download or read book Eighteenth Century Women Writers and the Gentleman s Liberation Movement written by Megan A. Woodworth and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-29 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late eighteenth-century English novel, the question of feminism has usually been explored with respect to how women writers treat their heroines and how they engage with contemporary political debates, particularly those relating to the French Revolution. Megan Woodworth argues that women writers' ideas about their own liberty are also present in their treatment of male characters. In positing a 'Gentleman's Liberation Movement,' she suggests that Frances Burney, Charlotte Smith, Jane West, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen all used their creative powers to liberate men from the very institutions and ideas about power, society, and gender that promote the subjection of women. Their writing juxtaposes the role of women in the private spheres with men's engagement in political structures and successive wars for independence (the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic Wars). The failures associated with fighting these wars and the ideological debates surrounding them made plain, at least to these women writers, that in denying the universality of these natural freedoms, their liberating effects would be severely compromised. Thus, to win the same rights for which men fought, women writers sought to remake men as individuals freed from the tyranny of their patriarchal inheritance.
Download or read book Fair Philosopher written by Lynn Marie Wright and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Fair Philosopher, the first sustained scholarly study of The Female Spectator, brings together an impressive collection of established and upcoming Haywood scholars who challenge much of the received opinion about this groundbreaking journal. Several of the essays show that Haywood's periodical was far more political than is generally thought, that its connections to her career as a novelist are more intimate than has been recognized, and that The Spectator was a target as well as a model. This collection makes a convincing argument that Haywood's periodical deserves far more critical attention than it has received so far and suggests new lines of development for future Haywood scholarship."--Publisher's website.
Download or read book British Women Writers and the Writing of History 1670 1820 written by Devoney Looser and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2003-05-01 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chosen by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title Until recently, history writing has been understood as a male enclave from which women were restricted, particularly prior to the nineteenth century. The first book to look at British women writers and their contributions to historiography during the long eighteenth century, British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670-1820, asks why, rather than writing history that included their own sex, some women of this period chose to write the same kind of history as men—one that marginalized or excluded women altogether. But as Devoney Looser demonstrates, although British women's historically informed writings were not necessarily feminist or even female-focused, they were intimately involved in debates over and conversations about the genre of history. Looser investigates the careers of Lucy Hutchinson, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Charlotte Lennox, Catharine Macaulay, Hester Lynch Piozzi, and Jane Austen and shows how each of their contributions to historical discourse differed greatly as a result of political, historical, religious, class, and generic affiliations. Adding their contributions to accounts of early modern writing refutes the assumption that historiography was an exclusive men's club and that fiction was the only prose genre open to women.
Download or read book Dress Distress and Desire written by J. Batchelor and published by Springer. This book was released on 2005-05-11 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dress, Distress and Desire explores representations of sartorial experience in eighteenth-century literature. Batchelor's study brings together for the first time canonical and non-canonical texts including novels, conduct books and women's magazines to investigate the pressures that the growth of the fashion market placed on conceptions of female virtue and propriety. It shows how dress dispelled the sentimental myth that the body acted as a moral index and enabled the women reader to resist some of sentimental literature's more prescriptive advice.
Download or read book Masquerade and Gender written by Catherine Craft-Fairchild and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Terry Castle's recent study of masquerade follows Bakhtin's analysis of the carnivalesque to conclude that, for women, masquerade offered exciting possibilities for social and sexual freedom. Castle's interpretation conforms to the fears expressed by male writers during the period&—Addison, Steele, and Fielding all insisted that masquerade allowed women to usurp the privileges of men. Female authors, however, often mistrusted these claims, perceiving that masquerade's apparent freedoms were frequently nothing more than sophisticated forms of oppression. Catherine Craft-Fairchild's work provides a useful corrective to Castle's treatment of masquerade. She argues that, in fictions by Aphra Behn, Mary Davys, Eliza Haywood, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Frances Burney, masquerade is double-sided. It is represented in some cases as a disempowering capitulation to patriarchal strictures that posit female subordination. Often within the same text, however, masquerade is also depicted as an empowering defiance of the dominant norms for female behavior. Heroines who attempt to separate themselves from the image of womanhood they consciously construct escape victimization. In both cases, masquerade is the condition of femininity: gender in the woman's novel is constructed rather than essential. Craft-Fairchild examines the guises in which womanhood appears, analyzing the ways in which women writers both construct and deconstruct eighteenth-century cultural conceptions of femininity. She offers a careful and engaging textual analysis of both canonical and noncanonical eighteenth-century texts, thereby setting lesser-read fictions into a critical dialogue with more widely known novels. Detailed readings are informed throughout by the ideas of current feminist theorists, including Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Mary Ann Doane, and Kaja Silverman. Instead of assuming that fictions about women were based on biological fact, Craft-Fairchild stresses the opposite: the domestic novel itself constructs the domestic woman.
Download or read book Sympathy Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century written by I. Csengei and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-12-13 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What makes it possible for self-interest, cruelty and violence to become part of the benevolent, compassionate ideology of eighteenth-century sensibility? This book explores forms of emotional response, including sympathy, tears, swoons and melancholia through a range of eighteenth-century literary, philosophical and scientific texts.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Feminist Literary Theory written by Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-03-23 with total page 770 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the cutting edge to the basics The latest advances as well as the essentials of feminist literary theory are at your fingertips as soon as you open this brand-new reference work. It features-in quick and convenient form-precise definitions of important terms and concise summaries of the salient ideas of critics working in the field who have made significant contributions to feminist literary studies, and points out how a feminist perspective has affected the development of emerging ideas and intellectual practices. Every effort has been made to include as many feminist thinkers as possible. Expanded coverage of key subjects Overview entries cover topics ranging from creativity, beauty, and eroticism topornography, violence, and war, with a thorough exploration of the major theoretical points of feminist literary approaches and concerns. In addition, entries organized around literary periods and fields, such as medieval studies, Shakespeare and Romanticism survey subjects in the framework of feminist literary theory and feminist concerns. Shows how feminist ideas have shaped literary theory The Encyclopedia gathers in one place all the key words, topics, proper names, and critical terminology of feminist literary theory. Emphasis throughout is on usage in the United States and Great Britain since the l970s. Each entry is accompanied by a bibliography that is a point of departure for further research. A key advantage of this Encyclopedia is that it amasses bibliographic references for so many important and often-cited works within a single volume. Instructors especially will find this information invaluable in the preparation of course material. Special FeaturesOffers precise contemporary definitions of all important critical terms * Summarizes the salient ideas of key literary critics * Overviews cover major theoretical issues * Entries on periods and fields survey feminist contributions * Emphasizes terminology that has evolved since the l970s * Indexes proper names, subjects, key words, and related topics
Download or read book An Introduction to Eighteenth Century Fiction written by John Skinner and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-03-14 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The formal and expressive range of canonic eighteenth-century fiction is enourmous: between them Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett and Sterne seem to have anticipated just about every question confronting the modern novelist; and Aphra Behn even raises a number of issues overlooked by her male successors. But one might also reverse the coin: much of what is present in these writers will today seem remote and bizarre. There is, in fact, only one novelist from the 'long' eighteenth century who is not an endangered species outside the protectorates of university English departments: Jane Austen. Plenty of people read her, moreover, without the need for secondary literature. These reservations were taken into account in the writing of this book. An Introduction to Eighteenth Century Fiction is a comprehensive and accessible introduction to English fiction from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen. It deals with novel criticism, canon formation and relations between genre and gender. The second part of the book contains an extensive discussion of Richardson and Fielding, followed by paired readings of major eighteenth-century novels, juxtaposing texts by Behn and Defoe, Sterne and Smollett, Lennox and Burney among others. The various sections of the book, and even the individual chapters, may be read independently or in any order. Works are discussed in a way intended to help students who have not read them, and even engage with some who never will. The author consumes eighteenth-century fiction avidly, but has tried to write a reader-friendly survey for those who may not.
Download or read book Unnatural Affections written by George E. Haggerty and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Author George Haggerty examines the ""unnatural"" affections that flout cultural taboos and challenge what are seen as natural boundaries to desire. Such affections abound in 18th-century novels, offering a complex understanding of the role of gender and the articulation of female desire during the age in which women novel writers came into their own.
Download or read book Triumphant Bodies written by Emily Smith and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-03-26 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Triumphant Bodies: Sexual-Political Conquest in British Women's Published Writing, 1660-1769 builds on recent scholarship such as Ros Ballaster's Seductive Forms and Catherine Gallagher's Nobody's Story in order to draw attention to professional female authors' use of a pliant vocabulary of sexuality and politics during the eighteenth century. Throughout the study, Smith emphasizes the blending of gendered, sexed, and politicized language a blending that allowed women to provocatively challenge, undermine, and rearticulate the terms of power and authority that were available to them in the literary marketplace. Triumphant Bodies centers on Aphra Behn, Mary Wortley Montagu, Charlotte Lennox, and Frances Brooke, with additional glances toward their contemporaries, including John Dryden, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Delarivier Manley, Henry Fielding, Anne Finch, Mary Leapor, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and Horace Walpole. Smith positions women's writing within dominant traditions but argues that women writers simultaneously understood themselves s part of a gendered trajectory. By drawing together a diverse and expansive range of texts by women, this study suggests the complexity of any attempt to define women's authorial triumphs during this period of tremendous vigor and transformation in the literary marketplace.
Download or read book The Whore s Story written by Bradford K. Mudge and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2000-06-08 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fresh and persuasively argued book examines the origins of pornography in Britain and presents a comprehensive overview of women's role in the evolution of obscene fiction. Carefully monitoring the complex interconnections between three related debates--that over the masquerade, that over the novel, and that over prostitution--Mudge contextualizes the growing literary need to separate good fiction from bad and argues that that process was of crucial importance to the emergence of a new, middle-class state. Looking closely at sermons, medical manuals, periodical essays, and political tracts as well as poetry, novels, and literary criticism, The Whore's Story tracks the shifting politics of pleasure in eighteenth-century Britain and charts the rise of modern, pornographic sensibilities.
Download or read book Disguise in George Sand s Novels written by Françoise Ghillebaert and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2009 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sandian heroines swirl around men in their sororal and sartorial disguises like moths around candle flames. However, as Disguise in George Sand's Novels illustrates, the disguise is not an instrument to seduce men but rather to assert the heroines' true selves. The portrayal of female and androgynous protagonists in Rose et Blanche (1831), Indiana (1832), Lélia (1833/39), Gabriel (1839), Consuelo (1842), and La Comtesse de Rudolstadt (1844) is a metaphor to demonstrate the continuity of identities before and after the disguise as George Sand stipulates in her theory of the ménechme. Disguise in George Sand's Novels explores the maturation process of Romantic and artistically inclined heroines and highlights the spiritual meaning of the disguise as a rite of passage for the birth of a new type of protagonist: spiritual, self-assertive, and dedicated to erasing gender inequality and helping the poor.
Download or read book The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood written by Kirsten T. Saxton and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Will be required reading not just for students of eighteenth-century literature but also for feminist critics and historians of the novel.” —Sandra M. Gilbert, award-winning poet and literary critic The most prolific woman writer of the eighteenth century, Eliza Haywood (1693–1756?) was a key player in the history of the English novel. Along with her contemporary Defoe, she did more than any other writer to create a market for fiction prior to the emergence of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett. Also one of Augustan England’s most popular authors, Haywood came to fame in 1719 with the publication of her first novel, Love in Excess. In addition to writing fiction, she was a playwright, translator, bookseller, actress, theater critic, and editor of The Female Spectator, the first English periodical written by women for women. Though tremendously popular, her novels and plays from the 1720s and 30s scandalized the reading public with explicit portrayals of female sexuality and led others to call her “the Great Arbitress of Passion.” Essays in this collection explore themes such as the connections between Haywood’s early and late work, her experiments with the form of the novel, her involvement in party politics, her use of myth and plot devices, and her intense interest in the imbalance of power between men and women. Distinguished scholars such as Paula Backschieder, Felicity Nussbaum, and John Richetti approach Haywood from a number of theoretical and topical positions, leading the way in a crucial reexamination of her work. The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood examines the formal and ideological complexities of her prose and demonstrates how Haywood’s texts defy traditional schematization.
Download or read book The Excellence of Falsehood written by Deborah L. Ross and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-10-17 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The only excellence of falsehood... is its resemblance to truth," proclaims a clergyman in Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote. He argues that romances are bad art; novels, he implies, are better. This clergyman's remarks -- repeating what literary and moral authorities had been saying since the late seventeenth century -- are central to Deborah Ross's discussion of romance characteristics in English women's novels. Aphra Behn, Delariviere Manley, Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Lennox, Fanny Burney, Ann Radcliffe, and Jane Austen did not take the clergyman's advice to heart. To them, the "falsehood" of romance was by no means self-evident, nor was the superior "excellence" of the novel. In theory, many of them accepted the distinction, but their works combined aspects of the romance and the novel in ways that brought them into conflict with the critical establishment. The texts discussed here illustrate a process of development both in the novel and in the conditions of women's lives. Tensions between romance and realism enabled women writers to question official versions of reality and to measure life against a romance ideal. By altering readers' perceptions and judgments, these authors gradually altered the reality that novels "resemble" and set up new combinations of romance and realism for future writers. This give-and-take between fiction and life is seen most dramatically in the way a "romantic" notion gradually comes to be treated in novels as both "real" and right. Ross follows one such notion -- that women have matrimonial preferences -- to the point where romance and reality merge. Ross's study brings to light an important part of the history of the novel not yet incorporated in theories and histories of the genre.
