The Family, Marriage, and Radicalism in British Women's Novels of the 1790s

The Family, Marriage, and Radicalism in British Women's Novels of the 1790s PDF Author: Jennifer Golightly
Publisher:
ISBN: 9786613634177
Category : English fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 165

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Book Description
"This book explores the ways in which five female radical novelists of the 1790s--Elizabeth Inchbald, Eliza Fenwick, Mary Hays, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Wollstonecraft--attempt to use the components of private life to work toward widespread social reform"--Provided by publisher.

The Family, Marriage, and Radicalism in British Women's Novels of the 1790s

The Family, Marriage, and Radicalism in British Women's Novels of the 1790s PDF Author: Jennifer Golightly
Publisher:
ISBN: 9786613634177
Category : English fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 165

Get Book

Book Description
"This book explores the ways in which five female radical novelists of the 1790s--Elizabeth Inchbald, Eliza Fenwick, Mary Hays, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Wollstonecraft--attempt to use the components of private life to work toward widespread social reform"--Provided by publisher.

The Family, Marriage, and Radicalism in British Women's Novels of the 1790s

The Family, Marriage, and Radicalism in British Women's Novels of the 1790s PDF Author: Jennifer Golightly
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1611483603
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 175

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Book Description
The female radical writers of the 1790s depict women attempting to use institutions such as the family, marriage, and motherhood to achieve social and political reform. Most striking about these novels is their depiction of the failure of these institutions to permit women to succeed in such attempts; these failures reveal a complex critique of the philosophies informing the reformist movement of the 1790s based upon the reformist culture's indifference to female concerns.

Didactic Novels and British Women's Writing, 1790-1820

Didactic Novels and British Women's Writing, 1790-1820 PDF Author: Hilary Havens
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317242726
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
Tracing the rise of conduct literature and the didactic novel over the course of the eighteenth century, this book explores how British women used the didactic novel genre to engage in political debate during and immediately after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Although didactic novels were frequently conventional in structure, they provided a venue for women to uphold, to undermine, to interrogate, but most importantly, to write about acceptable social codes and values. The essays discuss the multifaceted ways in which didacticism and women’s writing were connected and demonstrate the reforming potential of this feminine and ostensibly constricting genre. Focusing on works by novelists from Jane West to Susan Ferrier, the collection argues that didactic novels within these decades were particularly feminine; that they were among the few acceptable ways by which women could participate in public political debate; and that they often blurred political and ideological boundaries. The first part addresses both conservative and radical texts of the 1790s to show their shared focus on institutional reform and indebtedness to Mary Wollstonecraft, despite their large ideological range. In the second part, the ideas of Hannah More influence the ways authors after the French revolution often linked the didactic with domestic improvement and national unity. The essays demonstrate the means by which the didactic genre works as a corrective not just on a personal and individual level, but at the political level through its focus on issues such as inheritance, slavery, the roles of women and children, the limits of the novel, and English and Scottish nationalism. This book offers a comprehensive and wide-ranging picture of how women with various ideological and educational foundations were involved in British political discourse during a time of radical partisanship and social change.

Narrating Friendship and the British Novel, 1760-1830

Narrating Friendship and the British Novel, 1760-1830 PDF Author: Katrin Berndt
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317132610
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Friendship has always been a universal category of human relationships and an influential motif in literature, but it is rarely discussed as a theme in its own right. In her study of how friendship gives direction and shape to new ideas and novel strategies of plot, character formation, and style in the British novel from the 1760s to the 1830s, Katrin Berndt argues that friendship functions as a literary expression of philosophical values in a genre that explores the psychology and the interactions of the individual in modern society. In the literary historical period in which the novel became established as a modern genre, friend characters were omnipresent, reflecting enlightenment philosophy’s definition of friendship as a bond that civilized public and private interactions and was considered essential for the attainment of happiness. Berndt’s analyses of genre-defining novels by Frances Brooke, Mary Shelley, Sarah Scott, Helen Maria Williams, Charlotte Lennox, Walter Scott, Jane Austen, and Maria Edgeworth show that the significance of friendship and the increasing variety of novelistic forms and topics represent an overlooked dynamic in the novel’s literary history. Contributing to our understanding of the complex interplay of philosophical, socio-cultural and literary discourses that shaped British fiction in the later Hanoverian decades, Berndt’s book demonstrates that novels have conceived the modern individual not in opposition to, but in interaction with society, continuing Enlightenment debates about how to share the lives and the experiences of others.

The Female Philosopher and Her Afterlives

The Female Philosopher and Her Afterlives PDF Author: Deborah Weiss
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319553631
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
This book argues that the female philosopher, a literary figure brought into existence by Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, embodied the transformations of feminist thought during the transition from the Enlightenment to the Romantic period. By imagining a series of alternate lives and afterlives for the female philosopher, women authors of the early Romantic period used the resources of the novel to evaluate Wollstonecraft’s ideas and legacy. This book examines how these writers’ opinions converged on such issues as progress, education, and ungendered virtues, and how they diverged on a fundamental question connected to Wollstonecraft’s life and feminist thought: whether the enlightened, intellectual woman should live according to her own principles, or sacrifice moral autonomy in the interest of pragmatic accommodation to societal expectations.

The Political Thought of Thomas Spence

The Political Thought of Thomas Spence PDF Author: Matilde Cazzola
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000480844
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
The book is an intellectual analysis of the political ideas of English radical thinker Thomas Spence (1750–1814), who was renowned for his "Plan", a proposal for the abolition of private landownership and the replacement of state institutions with a decentralized parochial organization. This system would be realized by means of the revolution of the "swinish multitude", the poor labouring class despised by Edmund Burke and adopted by Spence as his privileged political interlocutor. While he has long been considered an eccentric and anachronistic figure, the book sets out to demonstrate that Spence was a deeply original, thoroughly modern thinker, who translated his themes into a popular language addressing the multitude and publicized his Plan through chapbooks, tokens, and songs. The book is therefore a history of Spence's political thought "from below", designed to decode the subtle complexity of his Plan. It also shows that the Plan featured an excoriating critique of colonialism and slavery as well as a project of global emancipation. By virtue of its transnational scope, the Plan made landfall in the British West Indies a few years after Spence's death. Indeed, Spencean ideas were intellectually implicated in the largest slave revolt in the history of Barbados.

British Romanticism in European Perspective

British Romanticism in European Perspective PDF Author: Steve Clark
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137461969
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
What, and when, is British Romanticism, if seen not in island isolation but cosmopolitan integration with European Romantic literature, history and culture? The essays here range from poetry and the novel to science writing, philosophy, visual art, opera and melodrama; from France and Germany to Italy and Bosnia.

The Routledge Companion to Romantic Women Writers

The Routledge Companion to Romantic Women Writers PDF Author: Ann R. Hawkins
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317041747
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 609

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Book Description
The Routledge Companion to Romantic Women Writers overviews critical reception for Romantic women writers from their earliest periodical reviews through the most current scholarship and directs users to avenues of future research. It is divided into two parts.The first section offers topical discussions on the status of provincial poets, on women’s engagement in children’s literature, the relation of women writers to their religious backgrounds, the historical backgrounds to women’s orientalism, and their engagement in debates on slavery and abolition.The second part surveys the life and careers of individual women – some 47 in all with sections for biography, biographical resources, works, modern editions, archival holdings, critical reception, and avenues for further research. The final sections of each essay offer further guidance for researchers, including “Signatures” under which the author published, and a “List of Works” accompanied, whenever possible, with contemporary prices and publishing formats. To facilitate research, a robust “Works Cited” includes all texts mentioned or quoted in the essay.

Families of the Heart

Families of the Heart PDF Author: Ann Campbell
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1684484251
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 111

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Book Description
In this innovative analysis of canonical British novels, Campbell identifies a new literary device—the surrogate family—as a signal of cultural anxieties about young women’s changing relationship to matrimony across the long eighteenth century. By assembling chosen families rather than families of origin, Campbell convincingly argues, female protagonists in these works compensate for weak family ties, explore the world and themselves, prepare for idealized marriages, or sidestep marriage altogether. Tracing the evolution of this rich convention from the female characters in Defoe’s and Richardson’s fiction who are allowed some autonomy in choosing spouses, to the more explicitly feminist work of Haywood and Burney, in which connections between protagonists and their surrogate sisters and mothers can substitute for marriage itself, this book makes an ambitious intervention by upending a traditional trope—the model of the hierarchal family—ultimately offering a new lens through which to regard these familiar works.

Women’s Economic Thought in the Romantic Age

Women’s Economic Thought in the Romantic Age PDF Author: Joanna Rostek
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429665318
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
This book examines the writings of seven English women economists from the period 1735–1811. It reveals that contrary to what standard accounts of the history of economic thought suggest, eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women intellectuals were undertaking incisive and gender-sensitive analyses of the economy. Women’s Economic Thought in the Romantic Age argues that established notions of what constitutes economic enquiry, topics, and genres of writing have for centuries marginalised the perspectives and experiences of women and obscured the knowledge they recorded in novels, memoirs, or pamphlets. This has led to an underrepresentation of women in the canon of economic theory. Using insights from literary studies, cultural studies, gender studies, and feminist economics, the book develops a transdisciplinary methodology that redresses this imbalance and problematises the distinction between literary and economic texts. In its in-depth readings of selected writings by Sarah Chapone, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Mary Robinson, Priscilla Wakefield, Mary Ann Radcliffe, and Jane Austen, this book uncovers the originality and topicality of their insights on the economics of marriage, women and paid work, and moral economics. Combining historical analysis with conceptual revision, Women’s Economic Thought in the Romantic Age retrieves women’s overlooked intellectual contributions and radically breaks down the barriers between literature and economics. It will be of interest to researchers and students from across the humanities and social sciences, in particular the history of economic thought, English literary and cultural studies, gender studies, economics, eighteenth-century and Romantic studies, social history, and the history of ideas.