Introduction : feminist historical criticism / Beth Fowkes Tobin -- "As sacred as friendship, as pleasurable as love" : father-son relations in the Tatler and Spectator / Shawn Lisa Maurer -- The anatomy of heroism : gender politics and empire in Gay's Polly / Dianne Dugaw -- Lady Mary Wortley Montague and the historical machinery of female identity / Jill Campbell -- Fielding and the comedy of attempted rape / Susan Staves -- Mary Delany, model to the age / Janice Farrar Thaddeus -- A night at the opera : the body, class, and art in Evelina and Frances Burney's Early diaries / Beth Kowaleski-Wallace -- Bluestockings in utopia / Ruth Perry -- Arthur Young, agriculture, and the construction of the new economic man / Beth Fowkes Tobin -- Sermons and strictures : conduct-book propriety and property relations in late eighteenth-century England / Kathryn Kirkpatrick -- "A peculiar protection" : Hanna More and the cultural politics of the Blagdon controversy / Mitzi Myers -- Jane Austen : tensions between security and marginality / Jan Fergus -- "That abominable traffic" : Mansfield Park and the dynamics of slavery / Joseph Lew.
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SUMMARY OR ABSTRACT
Text of Note
At once feminist and historical, the essays in History, Gender, and Eighteenth-Century Literature draw on culture, history, and gender as categories of analysis to explore British literature. From a variety of critical angles, the contributors to this volume contend that a comprehensive understanding of the circumstances and conditions of women's and men's lives is vital to the task of literary criticism. The texts under consideration range from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, from popular and subliterary genres, such as conduct books and agricultural manuals, to works by such canonical writers as Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Henry Fielding, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen. Providing models that will encourage feminists to turn to history and culture in their analyses of literary texts, these essays explore the cultural and historical specificity of ideas about women and men, their roles, and their "nature" as manifested in literature. Among the topics discussed are the ways in which texts create gendered subjectivities and promote the production of masculine and feminine spheres of activity; the use of more traditional historical methods aimed at rediscovering women's lived experience; the economic and political forces that shape women's lives; the legal foundations of women's powerlessness; the representation of the body; and violations of gender categories. A central tenet of feminist criticism in recent years has been the conviction that gender must be understood not just in biological terms but also in its fuller sense as a social and cultural construct. This assumption leads to the awareness that the conditions shaping women's experience - and the construction of gender - are constantly shifting. It is this challenge that the essays in History, Gender, and Eighteenth-Century Literature explore. "We must recognize historical difference," writes Beth Fowkes Tobin, "because with this understanding will come the recognition that as women, as writers, and as readers, we are constituted by our society, and upon this recognition depends our liberation."
TOPICAL NAME USED AS SUBJECT
Authorship-- Sex differences-- History-- 18th century.
English literature-- 18th century-- History and criticism.
Feminism and literature-- Great Britain-- History-- 18th century.
Literature and history-- Great Britain-- History-- 18th century.
Sex role in literature.
Women and literature-- Great Britain-- History-- 18th century.