Gender Lang Literary Crit 1660-1790
Cambridge University Press, 8/21/2008
EAN 9780521021456, ISBN10: 0521021456
Paperback, 244 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm
Language: English
During the eighteenth century, British critics applied terms of gender to literature according to the belief that masculine values represented the best literature and feminine terms signified less important works or authors. Laura Runge contends however that the meaning of gendered terms like 'manly' or 'effeminate' changes over time, and that the language of eighteenth-century criticism cannot be fully understood without careful analysis of the gendered language of the era. She examines conventions in various fields of critical language - Dryden's prose, the early novel, criticism by women, and the developing aesthetic - to show how gendered epistemology shaped critical 'truths'. Her exploration of critical commonplaces, such as regarding the heroic and the sublime as masculine modes and the novel as a feminine genre, addresses issues central to eighteenth-century studies.
1. Many words on Mount Parnassus
2. Dryden's gendered balance and the Augustan ideal
3. Paternity and regulation in the feminine novel
4. Aristotle's sisters
Behn, Lennox, Fielding and Reeve
5. Returning to the beautiful
Polemical postscript
Bibliography.