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This book explores the ways in which three women novelists of the late-17th and early-18th centuries challenged and reworked both contemporary gender ideologies and generic convention.
This book integrates new material, using sources from the eighteenth and nineteenth century periodical press, research with contemporary readers, the authors' critical reading of past and present magazines, and a clear discussion of theoretical approaches from literary criticism. The development of the genre, and its part in the historical process of forging modern definitions of gender, class and race are analysed through critical readings and a discussion of readers' negotiations with the contradictory pleasures of the magazine, and its constricting ideal of femininity.
Deconstruct changing representations of homosexuality with this important new work of cultural criticism! Homosexuality in French History and Culture explores episodes, patterns, and images of same-sex attraction in France from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century, from the essays of Michel de Montaigne to pride parades in contemporary Paris. This groundbreaking book documents the ways homosexuality has been named, experienced, regulated, understood, and imagined. During these centuries, homosexuality has been stigmatized as a sin, crime, or disease, and denounced as a threat to social order and national identity. Yet the rhetoric of condemnation has always co-existed with the reality o...
There is a detailed analysis of Manley's literary relationships with key figures such as Jonathan Swift and Richard Steele, and a full consideration of her political networks, including her working relationship with the Oxford ministry of 1710-1714."--BOOK JACKET.
The shared aim of these important new critical interventions into the early modern period is to make fresh feminist attempts to uncover the writings of Elizabethan and Jacobean women. Subject to silence, censorship and manipulation in the terms of overriding political concerns of the day, the feminist history of the early modern period is still a largely unwritten story. New feminist analysis can expose the conditions of production in which the history of the period was constructed: this revealing new Collection thereby exposes the untold stories which underpin the official texts. By beginning to explore this period from women's point of view, Women, Texts and Histories shows the crucial and fascinating ways in which women's writing may undermine many of the received assumptions on which the history of the period has depended.
Which John Dryden should be brought into the twenty-first-century college classroom? The rehabilitator of the ancients? The first of the moderns? The ambivalent laureate? The sidelined convert to Rome? The literary theorist? The translator? The playwright? The poet? This volume in the MLA series Approaches to Teaching World Literature addresses the tensions, contradictions, and versatility of a writer who, in the words of Samuel Johnson, "found [English poetry] brick, and left it marble," who was, in the words of Walter Scott, "one of the greatest of our masters." Part 1, "Materials," offers a guide to the teaching editions of Dryden's work and a discussion of the background resources, from biographies and literary criticism to social, cultural, political, and art histories. In part 2, "Approaches," essays describe different pedagogical entries into Dryden and his time. These approaches cover subjects as various as genre, adaptation, literary rivalry, musical setting, and political and religious poetry in classroom situations that range from the traditional survey to learning through performance.
Srinivas Aravamudan here reveals how Oriental tales, pseudo-ethnographies, sexual fantasies, and political satires took Europe by storm during the eighteenth century. Naming this body of fiction Enlightenment Orientalism, he poses a range of urgent questions that uncovers the interdependence of Oriental tales and domestic fiction, thereby challenging standard scholarly narratives about the rise of the novel. More than mere exoticism, Oriental tales fascinated ordinary readers as well as intellectuals, taking the fancy of philosophers such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Diderot in France, and writers such as Defoe, Swift, and Goldsmith in Britain. Aravamudan shows that Enlightenment Orientalism was a significant movement that criticized irrational European practices even while sympathetically bridging differences among civilizations. A sophisticated reinterpretation of the history of the novel, Enlightenment Orientalism is sure to be welcomed as a landmark work in eighteenth-century studies.
Informed by film theory and a broad historical approach, Fatal Desire examines the theatrical representation of women in England, from the Restoration to the early eighteenth century—a period when for the first time female actors could perform in public. Jean I. Marsden maintains that the feminization of serious drama during this period is tied to the cultural function of theater. Women served as symbols of both domestic and imperial propriety, and so Marsden links the representation of women on the stage to the social context in which the plays appeared and to the moral and often political lessons they offered the audience. The witty heroines of comedies were usually absorbed into the soc...
This study undertakes a new definition of the 18th-century novel's investment in visual culture, tracing the relationship between the development of the novel and that of the portrait, particularly as represented in the novel itself.
"There are two ladies in the province, I am told, who read," writes Frances Brooke's Arabella Fermor, "but both are above fifty and are regarded as prodigies of erudition." Brooke's The History of Emily Montague (1769) was the first work of fiction to be set in Canada, and also the first book to reflect on the situation of the woman writer there. Her analysis of the experience of writing in Canada is continued by the five other writers considered in this study - Susanna Moodie, Sara Jeannette Duncan, L.M. Montgomery, Margaret Atwood and Carol Shields. All of these authors examine the social position of the woman of letters in Canada, the intellectual stimulation available to her, the literar...