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This book contributes to the literary history of eighteenth-century women’s life writings, particularly those labeled “scandalous memoirs.” It examines how the evolution of this subgenre was shaped partially by several innovative memoirs that have received only modest critical attention. Breashears argues that Madame de La Touche’s Apologie and her friend Lady Vane’s Memoirs contributed to the crystallization of this sub-genre at mid-century, and that Lady Vane’s collaboration with Tobias Smollett in The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle resulted in a brilliant experiment in the relationship between gender and genre. It demonstrates that the Memoirs of Catherine Jemmat incorporated influential new strategies for self-justification in response to changing kinship priorities, and that Margaret Coghlan’s Memoirs introduced revolutionary themes that created a hybrid: the political scandalous memoir. This book will therefore appeal to scholars interested in life writing, women’s history, genre theory, and eighteenth-century British literature.
This book brings together two of the most significant British women writers of the Romantic period, Charlotte Smith and Helen Maria Williams, and explores the poetics and politics of their work.
This study will be a key resource for scholars, teachers, and students in British literary studies, women's studies, and cultural history.--Stuart Curran, University of Pennsylvania "Internet Review of Books"
Frances Burney and Narrative Prior to Ideology works between Burney’s Journals and Letters and her fiction more thoroughly than any study of her in the past twenty-five years. By doing so, it offers significant reinterpretations of Burney’s four novels: Evelina, Cecilia, Camilla, and The Wanderer. It describes Burney’s eluding the major modern–isms through which critics have tried to read her: Feminism (with its “gendering” of beauty and reversal of gender roles); Capitalism and its Marxist critique (here the details of Burney’s housekeeping become important); Professionalism (as a response to status inconsistency and class conflict); and Ian Watt’s “Formal Realism” (Burn...
Reveals the extent to which Charlotte Turner Smith's work constitutes as significant an achievement as her poetry, representing the turbulent decade of the 1790s on its social and political, as well as literary, planes with an unparalleled richness of detail and an unblinkered vision.
Dramatically expanding the boundaries of the British “Jacobin” novel, Conversion and Reform in the British Novel in the 1790s analyzes the works of a wide range of British reformists writing in the 1790s, including William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, and Maria Edgeworth, who reshaped the conventions of contemporary fiction to position the novel as a progressive political tool. Rather than aiming to launch a bloody revolution, these authors worked to initiate social and political reform in such areas as women’s rights, abolition, the Jewish question, and the leveling of the class system in Britain by converting the individual reader, one reader at a time.
Long the standard teaching anthology, the landmark Norton Anthology of Literature by Women has introduced generations of readers to the rich variety of women's writing in English.