Women and Property in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel
Women and Property in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel

Author: April London

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1999-06-28

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 1139426206

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This book investigates the critical importance of women to the eighteenth-century debate on property as conducted in the fiction of the period. April London argues that contemporary novels advanced several, often conflicting, interpretations of the relation of women to property, ranging from straightforward assertions of equivalence between women and things to subtle explorations of the self-possession open to those denied a full civic identity. Two contemporary models for the defining of selfhood through reference to property structure the book, one historical (classical republicanism and bourgeois individualism), and the other literary (pastoral and georgic). These paradigms offer a cultural context for the analysis of both canonical and less well-known writers, from Samuel Richardson and Henry Mackenzie to Clara Reeve and Jane West. While this study focuses on fiction from 1740–1800, it also draws on the historiography, literary criticism and philosophy of the period, and on recent feminist and cultural studies.

The Eighteenth-Century Novel and the Secularization of Ethics
The Eighteenth-Century Novel and the Secularization of Ethics

Author: Carol Stewart

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-23

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 1317034503

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Linking the decline in Church authority in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries with the increasing respectability of fiction, Carol Stewart provides a new perspective on the rise of the novel. The resulting readings of novels by authors such as Samuel Richardson, Sarah Fielding, Frances Sheridan, Charlotte Lennox, Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne, William Godwin, and Jane Austen trace the translation of ethical debate into secular and gendered terms. Stewart argues that the seventeenth-century debate about ethics that divided Latitudinarians and Calvinists found its way into novels of the eighteenth century. Her book explores the growing belief that novels could do the work of moral reform more effectively than the Anglican Church, with attention to related developments, including the promulgation of Anglican ethics in novels as a response to challenges to Anglican practice and authority. An increasingly legitimate genre, she argues, offered a forum both for investigating the situation of women and challenging patriarchal authority, and for challenging the dominant political ideology.

The Late Eighteenth-Century Confluence of British-German Sentimental Literature
The Late Eighteenth-Century Confluence of British-German Sentimental Literature

Author: Xiaohu Jiang

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2020-10-15

Total Pages: 143

ISBN-13: 1793618518

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The Late Eighteenth-century Confluence of British-German Sentimental Literature: The Lessing Brothers, Henry Mackenzie, Goethe, and Jane Austen analyzes the literary exchange and influence between British and German literature. Xiaohu Jiang focuses particularly on the process of this mutual influence—that is, translation—by observing how the political and cultural imbalance between the British and German literary fields impacted the conceptions, attitudes, and (in)visibility of translators in Britain and Germany in the late eighteenth century. To this end, Jiang carefully reads the paratexts of these translations, analyzing the resemblances between Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling and Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther and arguing that The Man of Feeling is a vital source of influence for Die Leiden des jungen Werther. Furthermore, this book also presents an in-depth analysis of Jane Austen’s creative appropriation of Die Leiden des jungen Werther and her oscillating attitudes toward sensibility, which is evidenced not only in her own texts, but also from her brother’s articles in The Loiterer. Scholars of literature, history, and international relations will find this book particularly useful.

The Rhetoric of Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Culture
The Rhetoric of Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Culture

Author: Paul Goring

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2004-12-23

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 1139456768

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The Rhetoric of Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Culture explores the burgeoning eighteenth-century fascination with the human body as an eloquent, expressive object. This wide-ranging study examines the role of the body within a number of cultural arenas - particularly oratory, the theatre and the novel - and charts the efforts of projectors and reformers who sought to exploit the textual potential of the body for the public assertion of modern politeness. Paul Goring shows how diverse writers and performers including David Garrick, James Fordyce, Samuel Richardson, Sarah Fielding and Laurence Sterne were involved in the construction of new ideals of physical eloquence - bourgeois, sentimental ideals which stood in contrast to more patrician, classical bodily modes. Through innovative readings of fiction and contemporary manuals on acting and public speaking, Goring reveals the ways in which the human body was treated as an instrument for the display of sensibility and polite values.