| Seductive Forms: Women's Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740 Contributor(s): Ballaster, Ros (Author) |
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ISBN: 0198184778 ISBN-13: 9780198184775 Publisher: Clarendon Press OUR PRICE: $85.50 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: June 1998 Annotation: Historicist and feminist accounts of the "rise of the novel" have neglected the phenomenon of the professional woman writer in England prior to the advent of the sentimental novel in the 1740s. Seductive Forms explores the means by which the three leading Tory women novelists of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries challenged and reworked both contemporary gender ideologies and generic convention. The seduction plot provided Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood with a vehicle for dramatizing their own appropriation of the "masculine" power of fiction-making. Seduction is employed in these fictions as a metaphor for both novelistic production (the seduction of the reader by the writer) and party political machination (the seduction of the public by the politician). The book also explores the debts early prose fiction owes to French seventeenth-century models of fiction-writing and argues that Behn, Manley, and Haywood succeeded in producing a distinctively "English" and female "form" for an amatory novel. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Literary Criticism | Women Authors - Literary Criticism | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh |
| Dewey: 823.085 |
| LCCN: 91043583 |
| Series: Clarendon Paperbacks |
| Physical Information: 0.63" H x 5.44" W x 8.53" (0.61 lbs) 240 pages |
| Themes: - Chronological Period - 18th Century - Cultural Region - British Isles - Sex & Gender - Feminine - Chronological Period - 20th Century |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: Historicist and feminist accounts of the rise of the novel have neglected the phenomenon of the professional woman writer in England prior to the advent of the sentimental novel in the 1740s. Seductive Forms explores the means by which the three leading Tory women novelists of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries challenged and reworked both contemporary gender ideologies and generic convention. The seduction plot provided Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood with a vehicle for dramatizing their own appropriation of the masculine power of fiction-making. Seduction is employed in these fictions as a metaphor for both novelistic production (the seduction of the reader by the writer) and party political machination (the seduction of the public by the politician). The book also explores the debts early prose fiction owes to French seventeenth-century models of fiction-writing and argues that Behn, Manley, and Haywood succeeded in producing a distinctively English and female form for an amatory novel. |