Seductive forms : women's amatory fiction from 1684 to 1740
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Bibliographic Information
Seductive forms : women's amatory fiction from 1684 to 1740
Clarendon Press , Oxford University Press, 1992
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [212]-225) and index
Description and Table of Contents
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 17th and early 18th 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 dramatising 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 17th-century models of fiction-writing and argues that Behn, Manley, and Haywood succeed in producing a distinctively "English" and female "form" for a amatory novel.
Table of Contents
- Part 1 Gender and genre: the rise of the novel - gender and genre in theories of prose fiction
- observing the forms - amatory fiction and the construction of a female reader. Part 2 Women writers: "A Devil on't, the Woman Damns the Poet" - Aphra Behn's fictions of feminine identity
- "A Genius for Love" - sex as politics as seduction in Eliza Haywood's amatory fiction
- "Preparatives to Love" - fiction as seduction in Eliza Haywood's amatory prose. Conclusion: The decline of amatory fiction - re(de)fining the female form.
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