"Drawing on correspondence, novels, literary criticism, and other documents by Riccoboni, Laclos, and Burney, Antoinette Sol demonstrates how these novelists, traditionally separated by nationality, gender, and genre, are in fact concerned with similar issues of individual authority and social criticism. She shows how arbitrary literary categorization of these writers as sentimental or libertine has kept their work from a reading which reveals their commonalities."--BOOK JACKET.
"Models of Reading will be of interest to Richardson, Burney, and Laclos scholars, as well as specialists in the history of the novel, the culture of sensibility, epistolary fiction, gender, and theories of reading. Koehler's arguments incorporate much recent criticism of eighteenth-century fiction, making this study a useful compendium even beyond the value of its own findings."--Jacket.
Analyzing four best-selling novels - by both women and men - written in the feminine voice, this book traces how the creation of women-centered salons and the emergence of a feminine poetic style engendered a new type of literature in eighteenth-century France. The author argues that writing in a female voice allowed writers of both sexes to break with classical notions of literature and style, so that they could create a modern sensibility that appealed to a larger reading public, and gave them scope to innovate with style and form. Wolfgang brings to light how the 'female voice' in literature came to embody the language of sociability, but also allowed writers to explore the domain of inter-subjectivity, while creating new bonds between writers and the reading public. Through examination of Marivaux's La Vie de Marianne, Graffigny's Lettres d'une Péruvienne, Riccoboni's Lettres de Mistriss Fanni Butlerd, and Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses, she shows that in France, this modern 'feminine' sensibility turned the least prestigious of literary genres - the novel - into the most compelling and innovative literary form of the eighteenth century. Emphasizing how the narratives analyzed here refashioned the French literary world through their linguistic innovation and expression of new forms of subjectivity, this study claims an important role for feminine-voice narratives in shaping the field of eighteenth-century literature.
Poet and novelist Charles Bukowski described promiscuity as "feast and feast and feast." The promiscuous person is having fun, getting away with it, and showing no signs of stopping. More often, though, promiscuity has been seen as demonic, as the sign of an uncivilised race, or as a symptom of mental disorder. Promiscuity in Western Literature capitalises on the fact that literature gives us deep and varied resources for reflecting on this controversial aspect of human behaviour. Drawing on authors from Homer to Margaret Atwood, it explores recurrent ideas and scenarios: Why does the literature of promiscuity evoke ideas of the animal? Why does it so often turn upon the image of the "excessive" woman? How and why does promiscuity feature in comic writing? How does the emergence of the modern city change representations of promiscuity? And, in the present day, what impact have ecological concerns had on the way writers depict promiscuity?
2005 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Through the Reading Glass explores the practices and protocols that surrounded women's reading in eighteenth-century France. Looking at texts as various as fairy tales, memoirs, historical romances, short stories, love letters, novels, and the pages of the new female periodical press, Suellen Diaconoff shows how a reading culture, one in which books, sex, and acts of reading were richly and evocatively intertwined, was constructed for and by women. Diaconoff proposes that the underlying discourse of virtue found in women's work was both an empowering strategy, intended to create new kinds of responsible and not merely responsive readers, and an integral part of the conviction that domestic reading does not have to be trivial.
A broad-based, innovative survey of rewriting in several modalities: translation, adaptation, recycling, appropriation, and re-mediation, along with the effect of each on form and meaning, kind and canon, historical and discursive continuity, as well as the conceptualizing of gender. Essays on Du Bellay, Montaigne, La Ceppède, Tbéophile de Viau, Corneille, d'Aubignac, La Fontaine, Diderot, and recent Anglo-American translations of La Princesse de Cleves.
French novels such as "Madame Bovary" and "The Stranger" are staples of high school and college literature courses. This work provides coverage of the French novel since its origins in the 16th century, with an emphasis on novels most commonly studied in high school and college courses in world literature and in French culture and civilization.
On the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the birth of the writer Frances Burney (1752–1840), a window to her memory was placed in the arched recess of stained glass that graces Poets’ Corner. Novelist, playwright and diarist, Frances Burney is one of the few women accorded such an honour. She joins the likes of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot who might in some ways be seen as her literary heirs. Burney’s journey to recognition on the stage of the world has been a long one, crowned finally with triumph. The service marked the mid-point of a two-day conference in which various aspects of Burney’s life and achievement were canvassed. Her journals and letters, her novels and plays (both comedies and tragedies), her life, family and context were all given serious scholarly treatment. This volume includes the papers presented at the conference, which cover the many facets of a remarkable career and represent the broad spectrum of scholarly approaches to the entire opus of Frances Burney. It shows how far Burney has come from being dismissed as a minor precursor to Jane Austen to being recognized in her own right as a powerful, complex and influential writer, whose works had considerable impact on her own and subsequent generations.
Winner of the Christian Gauss Award for excellence in literary scholarship from the Phi Beta Kappa Society Having excavated the world's earliest novels in his previous book, literary historian Steven Moore explores in this sequel the remarkable flowering of the novel between the years 1600 and 1800-from Don Quixote to America's first big novel, an homage to Cervantes entitled Modern Chivalry. This is the period of such classic novels as Tom Jones, Candide, and Dangerous Liaisons, but beyond the dozen or so recognized classics there are hundreds of other interesting novels that appeared then, known only to specialists: Spanish picaresques, French heroic romances, massive Chinese novels, Japanese graphic novels, eccentric English novels, and the earliest American novels. These minor novels are not only interesting in their own right, but also provide the context needed to appreciate why the major novels were major breakthroughs. The novel experienced an explosive growth spurt during these centuries as novelists experimented with different forms and genres: epistolary novels, romances, Gothic thrillers, novels in verse, parodies, science fiction, episodic road trips, and family sagas, along with quirky, unclassifiable experiments in fiction that resemble contemporary, avant-garde works. As in his previous volume, Moore privileges the innovators and outriders, those who kept the novel novel. In the most comprehensive history of this period ever written, Moore examines over 400 novels from around the world in a lively style that is as entertaining as it is informative. Though written for a general audience, The Novel, An Alternative History also provides the scholarly apparatus required by the serious student of the period. This sequel, like its predecessor, is a “zestfully encyclopedic, avidly opinionated, and dazzlingly fresh history of the most 'elastic' of literary forms” (Booklist).
Virginia Woolf once commented that the central image in Robinson Crusoe is an object—a large earthenware pot. Woolf and other critics pointed out that early modern prose is full of things but bare of setting and description. Explaining how the empty, unvisualized spaces of such writings were transformed into the elaborate landscapes and richly upholstered interiors of the Victorian novel, Cynthia Sundberg Wall argues that the shift involved not just literary representation but an evolution in cultural perception. In The Prose of Things, Wall analyzes literary works in the contexts of natural science, consumer culture, and philosophical change to show how and why the perception and representation of space in the eighteenth-century novel and other prose narratives became so textually visible. Wall examines maps, scientific publications, country house guides, and auction catalogs to highlight the thickening descriptions of domestic interiors. Considering the prose works of John Bunyan, Samuel Pepys, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, David Hume, Ann Radcliffe, and Sir Walter Scott, The Prose of Things is the first full account of the historic shift in the art of describing.
