Publisher:
The University Press of Kentucky, Lexington
The period from her first London assembly to her wedding day was the narrow span of autonomy for a middle-class Englishwoman in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For many women, as Katherine Sobba Green shows, the new ideal of...
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The period from her first London assembly to her wedding day was the narrow span of autonomy for a middle-class Englishwoman in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For many women, as Katherine Sobba Green shows, the new ideal of companionate marriage involved such thoroughgoing revisions in self-perception that a new literary form was needed to represent their altered roles.That the choice among suitors ideally depended on love and should not be decided on any other grounds was a principal theme among a group of heroine-centered novels published between 1740 and 1820. During these d
Cover; Title; Copyright; Contents; Acknowledgments; Introduction; Part I. A Feminized Genre; 1. The Courtship Novel: Textual Liberation for Women; 2. Eliza Haywood: A Mid-Career Conversion; 3. Mary Collyer: Genre Experiment; Part II. Feminist Reception Theory; 4. Early Feminist Reception Theory: Clarissa and The Female Quixote; 5. Charlotte Lennox: Henrietta, Runaway Ingenue; 6. Frances Moore Brooke: Emily Montague's Sanctum Sanctorum; Part III. The Commodification of Heroines; 7. The Blazon and the Marriage Act: Beginning for the Commodity Market
8. Fanny Burney: Cecilia, the Reluctant HeiressPart IV. Educational Reform; 9. Richardson and Wollstonecraft: The ""Learned Lady"" and the New Heroine; 10. Bluestockings, Amazons, Sentimentalists, and Fashionable Women; 11. Jane West: Prudentia Homespun and Educational Reform; 12. Mary Brunton: The Disciplined Heroine; Part V. The Denouement: Courtship and Marriage; 13. Courtship: ""When Nature Pronounces Her Marriageable""; 14. Maria Edgeworth: Belinda and a Healthy Scepticism; 15. Jane Austen: The Blazon Overturned; Conclusion; Chronology of Courtship Novels; Notes; Index; A; B; C; D; E; F
