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

• Autore: Johnson Claudia L
• Pubblicazione: Chicago, : University of Chicago Press, 1995
• Edizione: 1st ed.
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (256 p.)
• Disciplina: 823/.6099287
• Soggetto topico: 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
• 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."
• Titolo autorizzato: Equivocal beings
• ISBN: 1-282-53740-7; 0-226-40179-0; 9786612537400
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Record Nr.: 9910825616803321
• Lo trovi qui: Univ. Federico II
• Serie: Women in culture and society.