1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910825616803321

Autore

Johnson Claudia L

Titolo

Equivocal beings : politics, gender, and sentimentality in the 1790s : Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen / / Claudia L. Johnson

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Chicago, : University of Chicago Press, 1995

ISBN

1-282-53740-7

0-226-40179-0

9786612537400

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (256 p.)

Collana

Women in culture and society

Disciplina

823/.6099287

Soggetti

English fiction - Women authors - History and criticism

Politics and literature - Great Britain - History - 18th century

Women and literature - Great Britain - History - 18th century

English fiction - 18th century - History and criticism

Femininity in literature

Sentimentalism in literature

Authorship - Sex differences

Sex role in literature

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. [205]-231) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- CONTENTS -- FOREWORD -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- ABBREVIATIONS -- INTRODUCTION. The Age of Chivalry and the Crisis of Gender -- PART TWO. Ann Radcliffe -- PART THREE. Frances Burney -- AFTERWORD. Jane Austen -- NOTES -- INDEX

Sommario/riassunto

In the wake of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke argued that civil order depended upon nurturing the sensibility of men-upon the masculine cultivation of traditionally feminine qualities such as sentiment, tenderness, veneration, awe, gratitude, and even prejudice. Writers as diverse as Sterne, Goldsmith, Burke, and Rousseau were politically motivated to represent authority figures as men of feeling, but denied women comparable authority by representing their feelings as inferior, pathological, or criminal. Focusing on Mary Wollstonecraft, Ann Radcliffe, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen, whose popular works



culminate and assail this tradition, Claudia L. Johnson examines the legacy male sentimentality left for women of various political persuasions. Demonstrating the interrelationships among politics, gender, and feeling in the fiction of this period, Johnson provides detailed readings of Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, and Burney, and treats the qualities that were once thought to mar their work-grotesqueness, strain, and excess-as indices of ideological conflict and as strategies of representation during a period of profound political conflict. She maintains that the reactionary reassertion of male sentimentality as a political duty displaced customary gender roles, rendering women, in Wollstonecraft's words, "equivocal beings."