Women and Property in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel
Cambridge University Press, 7/8/1999
EAN 9780521650137, ISBN10: 0521650135
Hardcover, 276 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm
Language: English
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.
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I. Samuel Richardson and Georgic
Introduction
1. Clarissa and the georgic mode
2. Making meaning as constructive labor
3. Wicked confederacies
4. 'The work of bodies'
reading, writing and documents
Part II. Pastoral
Introduction
5. The Man of Feeling
6. Colonial narratives
Charles Wentworth and The Female American
Part III. Community and Confederacy
Introduction
7. Versions of community
William Dodd, Sarah Scott, Clara Reeve
8. Confederacies of women
Phebe Gibbes and John Trusler
Part IV. The Politics of Reading
Introduction
9. The discourse of manliness
Samuel Jackson Pratt and Robert Bage
10. The gendering of radical representation
11. History, romance, and the anti-Jacobins' 'common sense'
12. Jane West and the politics of reading
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index.