Women's Lives and the 18th-century English Novel

Women's Lives and the 18th-century English Novel PDF Author: Elizabeth Bergen Brophy
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 9780813010366
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
Novels of the eighteenth century usually offer wedded bliss as a reward to their heroines. How did these novels affect—and how were they affected by—the women who were reading them? By drawing upon thousands of unpublished documents from the era, written by more than 250 women, Brophy creates a picture of the real lives of eighteenth-century women and then examines the work of seven novelists in relation to this portrait. Excerpts from letters, diaries, and journals, written by women ranging from servants to nobility, reveal the stages of feminine life in the 1700s: dutiful daughter, courted maiden, obedient wife, and pitiful widow or spinster. Their lives are assessed against those portrayed in the works of seven novelists—five women (Sarah Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, Sarah Scott, Clara Reeve and Fanny Burney) and two men (Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson). Fiction both reflects and creates the values of its time. In the eighteenth century, marriage was regarded as every woman's vocation and the novel often reinforced this conviction. “Only leave me myself,” the heroine's plea in Richardson's Clarissa, laments the dependent position of women in the age. However, the novel also influenced the self-perception of eighteenth-century women in a positive way, Brophy asserts, by admiring their intelligence, by condemning sexual transgressions in and out of marriage, and, most important, by placing women at the center of their own stories, as heroines in their own right. The abundant primary materials and straightforward writing in Women's Lives and the Eigtheenth-Century English Novel make this a book of interest to scholars of social and cultural history and to students of the novel.

Women's Lives and the 18th-century English Novel

Women's Lives and the 18th-century English Novel PDF Author: Elizabeth Bergen Brophy
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 9780813010366
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
Novels of the eighteenth century usually offer wedded bliss as a reward to their heroines. How did these novels affect—and how were they affected by—the women who were reading them? By drawing upon thousands of unpublished documents from the era, written by more than 250 women, Brophy creates a picture of the real lives of eighteenth-century women and then examines the work of seven novelists in relation to this portrait. Excerpts from letters, diaries, and journals, written by women ranging from servants to nobility, reveal the stages of feminine life in the 1700s: dutiful daughter, courted maiden, obedient wife, and pitiful widow or spinster. Their lives are assessed against those portrayed in the works of seven novelists—five women (Sarah Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, Sarah Scott, Clara Reeve and Fanny Burney) and two men (Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson). Fiction both reflects and creates the values of its time. In the eighteenth century, marriage was regarded as every woman's vocation and the novel often reinforced this conviction. “Only leave me myself,” the heroine's plea in Richardson's Clarissa, laments the dependent position of women in the age. However, the novel also influenced the self-perception of eighteenth-century women in a positive way, Brophy asserts, by admiring their intelligence, by condemning sexual transgressions in and out of marriage, and, most important, by placing women at the center of their own stories, as heroines in their own right. The abundant primary materials and straightforward writing in Women's Lives and the Eigtheenth-Century English Novel make this a book of interest to scholars of social and cultural history and to students of the novel.

Women and Urban Life in Eighteenth-Century England

Women and Urban Life in Eighteenth-Century England PDF Author: Rosemary Sweet
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351872117
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Despite the considerable volume of research into various aspects of the social and economic, cultural and political history of eighteenth-century British towns, remarkably little has focused upon, or even reflected upon the distinctive experience of women in the urban context. Much of what research there is has explored the experience of laboring or impoverished women, or women of the social elite; by contrast, the essays in this collection take up the study of the participation of middling women in urban life. This volume brings into sharper focus the relationship between changes consequent upon urban development and shifts in the pattern of gender relations in the 18th century. The contributors address such themes as the extent to which to what extent urban change accelerated a redefinition of gender relations; the connections between urban growth, changing definitions of citizenship, and the emergence of the male gendered political subject; the role of women in a literate, consumer and industrializing society; the place of women's networks in the economic, political and social life of the town and the distinctive role played by women in areas such as philanthropy and business; and how the development of urban society in turn inflected contemporary conceputalizations of gender.

Women, Work, and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel

Women, Work, and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel PDF Author: Chloe Wigston Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107035007
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
This book charts the novel's vibrant engagement with clothes, examining how fiction revises and reshapes material objects within its pages.

Women, Gender, and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Women, Gender, and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain PDF Author: Temma Berg
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611461421
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
This edited collection, a tribute to the late noted eighteenth-century scholar Betty Rizzo, testifies to her influence as a researcher, writer, teacher, and mentor. The essays, written by a range of established and younger eighteenth-century specialists, expand on the themes important to Rizzo: the importance of the archive, the contributions of women writers to the canon of eighteenth-century literature and to an emerging print culture, the sometimes fraught relations within the eighteenth-century family, the relationship between life and literature, and, finally, the role of female companionship in women’s lives. Divided into three sections, “Living in the Eighteenth-Century Novel,” “Living in the Eighteenth-Century World,” and “Afterlives,” the fourteen essays that form the body of the collection treat such topics as epistolarity, fraternal relations in novels and in families, women and travel in Jane Austen’s novels, the pleasures and challenges of searching through archives to understand the complex entanglements of eighteenth-century families, the changing reception of Alexander Pope’s poetry, and intersections among race, class, gender, and sexuality in a famous early-nineteenth-century Scottish libel case. The final essay of the fourteen connects the archetypal eighteenth-century figure of the seduced and abandoned woman to Sophie Calle’s 2007 Venice Biennale exhibition entitled Take Care of Yourself, which the author reads as a direct descendant of the eighteenth-century letter novel.The book is framed by an introduction that situates the book as part of the ongoing redefinition of the archive of eighteenth-century literature and an afterword that gives a personal account of Rizzo’s career and her indelible legacy as friend, mentor, and professional model. The contributors use a variety of methods in their scholarship, but a common strand is archival research and close reading inflected by feminist analysis. The book will appeal to students and scholars of eighteenth-century British literature and culture and to those interested in women’s writing and women’s relationships in the eighteenth century—and today—and in feminist literary history. The contributors to the volume practice the kind of scholarship Rizzo was known for—painstaking archival research and attention to the nuances of relationships among eighteenth-century women (and men)—and in so doing shed new light on a number of familiar and not-so-familiar eighteenth-century texts.

Ends of Empire

Ends of Empire PDF Author: Laura Brown
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801480959
Category : English literature
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
This book explores the representation of women in english literature from the Restoration to the fall of Walpole.

Women in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

Women in Eighteenth-Century Scotland PDF Author: Deborah Simonton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134774923
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
The eighteenth century looms large in the Scottish imagination. It is a century that saw the doubling of the population, rapid urbanisation, industrial growth, the political Union of 1707, the Jacobite Rebellions and the Enlightenment - events that were intrinsic to the creation of the modern nation and to putting Scotland on the international map. The impact of the era on modern Scotland can be seen in the numerous buildings named after the luminaries of the period - Adam Smith, David Hume, William Robertson - the endorsement of Robert Burns as the national poet/hero, the preservation of the Culloden battlefield as a tourist attraction, and the physical geographies of its major towns. Yet, while it is a century that remains central to modern constructions of national identity, it is a period associated with men. Until recently, the history of women in eighteenth-century Scotland, with perhaps the honourable exception of Flora McDonald, remained unwritten. Over the last decade however, research on women and gender in Scotland has flourished and we have an increasingly full picture of women's lives at all social levels across the century. As a result, this is an appropriate moment to reflect on what we know about Scottish women during the eighteenth century, to ask how their history affects the traditional narratives of the period, and to reflect on the implications for a national history of Scotland and Scottish identity. Divided into three sections, covering women's intimate, intellectual and public lives, this interdisciplinary volume offers articles on women's work, criminal activity, clothing, family, education, writing, travel and more. Applying tools from history, art anthropology, cultural studies, and English literature, it draws on a wide-range of sources, from the written to the visual, to highlight the diversity of women's experiences and to challenge current male-centric historiographies.

Women's Lives and the Eighteenth-century Novel

Women's Lives and the Eighteenth-century Novel PDF Author: Elizabeth Bergen Brophy
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813010366
Category : English fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Unnatural Affections

Unnatural Affections PDF Author: George E. Haggerty
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253211835
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
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.

Writing Lives in the Eighteenth Century

Writing Lives in the Eighteenth Century PDF Author: Tanya M. Caldwell
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1684482283
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
Writing Lives in the Eighteenth Century is a collection of essays on memoir, biography, and autobiography during a formative period for the genre. The essays revolve around recognized male and female figures—returning to the Boswell and Burney circle—but present arguments that dismantle traditional privileging of biographical modes. The contributors reconsider the processes of hero making in the beginning phases of a culture of celebrity. Employing the methodology William Godwin outlined for novelists of taking material “from all sources, experience, report, and the records of human affairs,” each contributor examines within the contexts of their time and historical traditions the anxieties and imperatives of the auto/biographer as she or he shapes material into a legacy. New work on Frances Burney D’Arblay’s son, Alexander, as revealed through letters; on Isabelle de Charriere; on Hester Thrale Piozzi; and on Alicia LeFanu and Frances Burney’s realignment of family biography extend current conversations about eighteenth century biography and autobiography. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Women in Eighteenth Century Europe

Women in Eighteenth Century Europe PDF Author: Margaret Hunt
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131788387X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 561

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Book Description
Was the century of Voltaire also the century of women? In the eighteenth century changes in the nature of work, family life, sexuality, education, law, religion, politics and warfare radically altered the lives of women. Some of these developments caused immense confusion and suffering; others greatly expanded women’s opportunities and worldview – long before the various women’s suffrage movements were more than a glimmer on the horizon. This study pays attention to queens as well as commoners; respectable working women as well as prostitutes; women physicists and mathematicians as well as musicians and actresses; feminists as well as their critics. The result is a rich and morally complex tale of conflict and tragedy, but also of achievement. The book deals with many regions and topics often under-represented in general surveys of European women, including coverage of the Balkans and both European Turkey and Anatolia, of Eastern Europe, of European colonial expansion (particularly the slave trade) and of Muslim, Eastern Orthodox, and Jewish women's history. Bringing all of Europe into the narrative of early modern women's history challenges many received assumptions about Europe and women in past times, and provides essential background for dealing with issues of diversity in the Europe of today.