Reading Daughters' Fictions 1709-1834: Novels and Society from Manley to Edgeworth

Forside
Cambridge University Press, 14. mars 1996 - 287 sider
It has been argued that the eighteenth century witnessed a decline in paternal authority, and the emergence of more intimate, affectionate relationships between parent and child. In Reading Daughters' Fictions, Caroline Gonda draws on a wide range of novels and non-literary materials from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in order to examine changing representations of the father-daughter bond. She shows that heroine-centred novels, aimed at a predominantly female readership, had an important part to play in female socialization and the construction of heterosexuality, in which the father-daughter relationship had a central role. Contemporary diatribes against novels claimed that reading fiction produced rebellious daughters, fallen women, and nervous female wrecks. Gonda's study of novels of family life and courtship suggests that, far from corrupting the female reader, such fictions helped to maintain rather than undermine familial and social order.

Inni boken

Innhold

Fictions of accident? Representations of incest in Manley
38
Richardson
66
Sarah Scott and tests
105
the Sins of the Fathers in Gothic
140
from Elizabeth Inchbald to Mary Brunton
174
Her fathers daughter? The life and fictions of Maria
204
Notes
239
Bibliography
259
Index
283
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