This book examines continuities and changes in narrative strategies deployed to deal with female desire in a broad range of fiction from the late sixteenth-century to the early nineteenth-century. By focussing on 'designing women' and the lengths to which they can and should go as agents of their desires, this book investigates the way generic and moral or social issues intersect in the depiction of female subjectivity. The book examines narrative strategies deployed in the representation of female desire in a broad range of fiction from the late sixteenth-century to the early-nineteenth century, discussing key texts such as Jane Eyre, Pamela, Pride and Prejudice and Arcadia

This volume provides a new context for women’s writing from the seventeenth through the end of the nineteenth century, highlighting the significant role of the parsonage and the parson himself for women’s education in those centuries. Cindy K. Renker and Susanne Bach's collection of essays is the first of its kind on the education, lives, and works of highly accomplished daughters of Protestant clergymen. Since this volume only represents a limited number of women raised and educated in parsonages, it will surely encourage more investigation of other women writers, translators, educators, etc. with similar backgrounds. Moreover, since this book takes a comparative and transnational approach by focusing on different regions of Europe and different centuries. This collection of essays is thus aimed at scholars in multiple fields such as British literature, German studies, gender studies, the history of women’s education, and social and cultural history.

Gender, Interpretation, and Political Rule in Sidney's Arcadia studies cultural ideologies regarding gender and monarchy in early modern England by examining transformations of a single text, Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, in their historical contexts. It reveals changing tensions in the ideological struggles over queenship, especially with respect to cultural debates focused on anxieties about gendered reception and interpretation of persuasive rhetoric. The cultural shift between about 1550 and 1650 regarding gendered interpretation and political rule--a shift that was by no means complete or homogenous--reflects the changing position of women and their relationship to language within early modern domestic and political ideological discourses. The book begins by investigating primary cultural, political, and historical sources in order to provide a cultural scaffolding helpful to the interpretation of Sidney's enormously popular work. These sources include conduct manuals, gynecocratic debates, paintings, poems, diaries, pamphlets, and letters. Gender, Interpretation, and Political Rule then considers the initial version of the Arcadia (the Old Arcadia) Sidney authored and argues that Sidney's involvement in the marriage debate regarding the Duke of Anjou's courtship of Elizabeth I in the late 1570s shaped his representations of female characters and their questionable ability to interpret persuasive rhetoric. Next, the book turns to Sidney's expanded and revised version (the New Arcadia), authorized and published by his sister the Countess of Pembroke Mary Sidney Herbert. The New Arcadia ultimately provides a more positive representation of women readers and rulers and reveals a shift in cultural understandings of women's relationship to the persuasive rhetoric that both describes and enacts political power and authority. The penultimate chapter examines paradigms of active reading and their political consequences in Lady Mary Wroth's The Countess of Montgomery's Urania that demonstrate a need for well-balanced identification with characters. Finally, this book focuses on a little-studied seventeenth-century continuation of Sidney's work by a young woman, Anna Weamys, who asserts her authority as an interpreter of Sidney's Arcadia and in the process creates a political commentary about the legitimacy of female authority and influence just after the English Civil War.

A comprehensive look at the academic criticism of Jane Austen from her time down to the present. Among the most important English novelists, Jane Austen is unusual because she is esteemed not only by academics but by the reading public. Her novels continue to sell well, and films adapted from her works enjoy strong box-officesuccess. The trajectory of Austen criticism is intriguing, especially when one compares it to that of other nineteenth-century English writers. At least partly because she was a woman in the early nineteenth century, she was longneglected by critics, hardly considered a major figure in English literature until well into the twentieth century, a hundred years after her death. Yet consequently she did not suffer from the reaction against Victorianism thatdid so much to hurt the reputation of Dickens, Tennyson, Arnold, and others. How she rose to prominence among academic critics - and has retained her position through the constant shifting of academic and critical trends - is a story worth telling, as it suggests not only something about Austen's artistry but also about how changes in critical perspective can radically alter a writer's reputation. Laurence W. Mazzeno is President Emeritus of Alvernia University, Reading, Pennsylvania.

Lists editions, books, articles, and dissertation abstracts published from 1945 to 1999 on every field of nineteenth-century British studies