Masking and Unmasking the Female Mind

Masking and Unmasking the Female Mind
Title Masking and Unmasking the Female Mind PDF eBook
Author Mary Anne Schofield
Publisher University of Delaware Press
Pages 236
Release 1990
Genre Fiction
ISBN 9780874133653

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This work concentrates on how eighteenth-century feminine novelists articulate the concerns important to women's lives and fates, and argues that these novelists used their romances to combat the controlling ideologies of the age.

Unnatural Affections

Unnatural Affections
Title Unnatural Affections PDF eBook
Author George E. Haggerty
Publisher Indiana University Press
Pages 228
Release 1998-05-22
Genre Social Science
ISBN 9780253115096

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"... compelling... One draws from Haggerty's very deft readings a strong understanding of the ways in which women writers worked to resist, with greater and lesser success, the increasing demand that gender relations be normalized by imagining ever more possibilities for deviance." -- Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature George Haggerty examines the "unnatural" affections that abound in 18th-century novels. Their portrayal offered a complex understanding of the role of gender and the articulation of female desire during the age in which women novel writers came into their own. The novelists offered romantic friends, effeminized male partners, maimed heroines, paternal obsession, and lesbian couples -- relations that defied cultural taboos of the time

Family Matters in the British and American Novel

Family Matters in the British and American Novel
Title Family Matters in the British and American Novel PDF eBook
Author Andrea O'Reilly Herrera
Publisher Popular Press
Pages 306
Release 1997
Genre Literary Criticism
ISBN 9780879727468

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Family Matters in the British and American Novel examines the literature that challenges and alters widely held assumptions about the form of the family, familial authority patterns, and the function of courtship, marriage, and family life from the late-eighteenth century to the present day.

Masquerade and Gender

Masquerade and Gender
Title Masquerade and Gender PDF eBook
Author Catherine A. Craft-Fairchild
Publisher Penn State Press
Pages 205
Release 2012-03-31
Genre Social Science
ISBN 0271038209

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Terry Castle's recent study of masquerade follows Bakhtin's analysis of the carnivalesque to conclude that, for women, masquerade offered exciting possibilities for social and sexual freedom. Castle's interpretation conforms to the fears expressed by male writers during the period—Addison, Steele, and Fielding all insisted that masquerade allowed women to usurp the privileges of men. Female authors, however, often mistrusted these claims, perceiving that masquerade's apparent freedoms were frequently nothing more than sophisticated forms of oppression. Catherine Craft-Fairchild's work provides a useful corrective to Castle's treatment of masquerade. She argues that, in fictions by Aphra Behn, Mary Davys, Eliza Haywood, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Frances Burney, masquerade is double-sided. It is represented in some cases as a disempowering capitulation to patriarchal strictures that posit female subordination. Often within the same text, however, masquerade is also depicted as an empowering defiance of the dominant norms for female behavior. Heroines who attempt to separate themselves from the image of womanhood they consciously construct escape victimization. In both cases, masquerade is the condition of femininity: gender in the woman's novel is constructed rather than essential. Craft-Fairchild examines the guises in which womanhood appears, analyzing the ways in which women writers both construct and deconstruct eighteenth-century cultural conceptions of femininity. She offers a careful and engaging textual analysis of both canonical and noncanonical eighteenth-century texts, thereby setting lesser-read fictions into a critical dialogue with more widely known novels. Detailed readings are informed throughout by the ideas of current feminist theorists, including Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Mary Ann Doane, and Kaja Silverman. Instead of assuming that fictions about women were based on biological fact, Craft-Fairchild stresses the opposite: the domestic novel itself constructs the domestic woman.

British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670-1820

British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670-1820
Title British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670-1820 PDF eBook
Author Devoney Looser
Publisher JHU Press
Pages 388
Release 2003-05-01
Genre Literary Criticism
ISBN 0801876400

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Chosen by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title Until recently, history writing has been understood as a male enclave from which women were restricted, particularly prior to the nineteenth century. The first book to look at British women writers and their contributions to historiography during the long eighteenth century, British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670-1820, asks why, rather than writing history that included their own sex, some women of this period chose to write the same kind of history as men—one that marginalized or excluded women altogether. But as Devoney Looser demonstrates, although British women's historically informed writings were not necessarily feminist or even female-focused, they were intimately involved in debates over and conversations about the genre of history. Looser investigates the careers of Lucy Hutchinson, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Charlotte Lennox, Catharine Macaulay, Hester Lynch Piozzi, and Jane Austen and shows how each of their contributions to historical discourse differed greatly as a result of political, historical, religious, class, and generic affiliations. Adding their contributions to accounts of early modern writing refutes the assumption that historiography was an exclusive men's club and that fiction was the only prose genre open to women.

The Prospect Before Her

The Prospect Before Her
Title The Prospect Before Her PDF eBook
Author Olwen Hufton
Publisher Vintage
Pages 673
Release 2011-06-15
Genre History
ISBN 0307791947

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Already hailed by English critics as "one of the most important works of history to be published since the Second World War, " Olwen Hufton's fascinating and brilliantly learned study begins, in this first of two volumes, with a wide ranging exploration of women's fate in Western Europe from medieval times to the early modern age. of illustrations.

Presenting Gender

Presenting Gender
Title Presenting Gender PDF eBook
Author Chris Mounsey
Publisher Bucknell University Press
Pages 310
Release 2001
Genre Literary Criticism
ISBN 9780838754771

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A collection of essays that concerns writers or real people of the early modern period who presented their protagonists or themselves as members of the opposite biological sex. The collection demonstrates the variety of motives for such acts of gender passing, and offers interpretations that shed some light on the probable intentions of the gender passers.