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Helen Thompson'sIngenuous Subjectionoffers a new feminist history of the eighteenth-century domestic novel. By reading social contract theory alongside representations of the domestic sphere by authors such as Mary Astell, Mary Davys, Samuel Richardson, Eliza Haywood, and Frances Sheridan, Thompson shows how these writers confront women's paradoxical status as both contractual agents and naturally subject wives. Over the long eighteenth century, Thompson argues, domestic novelists appropriated the standard of political modernity advanced by John Locke and others as a citizen's free or \"ingenuous\" assent to the law. The domestic novel figures feminine political difference not as women's deviation from an abstract universal but rather as their failure freely or ingenuously to submit to the power retained by Enlightenment husbands.Ingenuous Subjectionclaims domestic novelists as vital participants in Enlightenment political discourse. By tracing the political, philosophical, and generic significance of feminine compliance, this book revises our literary historical account of the rise of the novel. Rather than imagining a realm of harmonious sentiment, domestic fiction represents the persistent arbitrariness of eighteenth-century men's conjugal power.Ingenuous Subjectionrevises feminist theory and historiography, locating the genealogy of feminism in a contractual model of ingenuous assent which challenges the legitimacy of masculine conjugal government. The first study to treat feminine compliance as something other than a passive, politically neutral exercise,Ingenuous Subjectionrecovers in this practice the domestic novel's critical engagement with the limits of Enlightenment modernity.

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.

This Companion, first published in 2000, addresses the work of women playwrights in Britain throughout the twentieth century. The chapters explore the historical and theatrical contexts in which women have written for the theatre and examine the work of individual playwrights. A chronological section on playwriting from the 1920s to the 1970s is followed by chapters which raise issues of nationality and identity. Later sections question accepted notions of the canon and include chapters on non-mainstream writing, including black and lesbian performance. Each section is introduced by the editors, who provide a narrative overview of a century of women's drama and a thorough chronology of playwriting, set in political context. The collection includes essays on the individual writers Caryl Churchill, Sarah Daniels, Pam Gems and Timberlake Wertenbaker as well as extensive documentation of contemporary playwriting in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, including figures such as Liz Lochhead and Anne Devlin.

The women's sensation novel of the 1860s and the New Woman fiction of the 1890s were two major examples of a perceived feminine invasion of fiction which caused a critical furore in their day. Both genres, with their shocking, `fast' heroines, fired the popular imagination by putting female sexuality on the literary agenda and undermining the `proper feminine' ideal to which nineteenth-century women and fictional heroines were supposed to aspire. By exploring in impressive depth and breadth the material and discursive conditions in which these novels were produced, The `Improper' Feminine draws attention to key gendered interrelationships within the literary and wider cultures of the mid-Victorian and fin-de-diècle periods.

In this strikingly original treatment of the rise of the novel, Nancy Armstrong argues that the novels and non- fiction written by and for women in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England paved the way for the rise of the modern English middle class. Most critical studies of the novel mistakenly locate political power exclusively in the official institutions of state, ignoring the political domain over which women hold authority, which includes courtship practices, family relations, and the use of leisure time. To remedy this, Armstrong provides a dual analysis, tracing both the rise of the novel and the evolution of female authority as part of one phenomenon.

Considering as evidence literary texts, historical documents, and material culture, this interdisciplinary study examines the entry into public political culture of women and apprentices in seventeenth-century England, and their use of discursive and literary forms in advancing an imaginary of political equality. Subordinate Subjects traces to the end of Elizabeth Tudor's reign in the 1590s the origin of this imaginary, analyses its flowering during the English Revolution, and examines its afterlife from the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 to the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89. It uses post-Marxist theories of radical democracy, post-structuralist theories of gender, and a combination of political theory and psychoanalysis to discuss the early modern construction of the political subject. Subordinate Subjects makes a distinctive contribution to the study of early modern English literature and culture through its chronological range, its innovative use of political, psychoanalytic, and feminist theories, and its interdisciplinary focus on literature, social history, political thought, gender studies, and cultural studies. Contents: Introduction; Apprentices and the national-popular; Gender and the political imaginary; Women's writing and the politics of history; Petitioning apprentices, petitioning wives; 'Royalist' women and the English Revolution; Apprentices, wives, 'whores' and the political nation; Women, print culture, and the public sphere; Epilogue; Bibliography; Index. Mihoko Suzuki is Professor of English at the University of Miami. She is the author of Metamorphoses of Helen: Authority, Difference, and the Epic (Cornell University Press 1989), editor of Critical Essays on Edmund Spenser (Macmillan, 1996) and co-editor, with Cristina Malcolmson, of Debating Gender in Early Modern England, 1500-1700 (Palgrave, 2002).

Roberts argues that Clarissa's, Hester's, Isabel's, and Tess's \"heroism\" or \"greatness\" is measured not by her actions but by the extent to which others are moved by her. Therefore, the character cannot be studied without studying the response she generates, which, in these novels, is sympathy. Roberts asserts that each of the novels can be understood as a school of sympathy, through which we learn to behave and feel as gendered subjects, and that our response to the heroine is as carefully crafted as the character herself.

Revising Women is a collection of essays by a distinguished group of feminist critics. Each essay is a contribution to the history of the English novel, to our understanding of literature's place in cultural debate, and to women's studies. The essays give steady attention to the ways novels participate in social processes and the ways women.

This collection of essays, both feminist and historical, analyzes power relations between men and women in the Victorian period. This volume is the first to reshape Victorian studies from the perspective of the postmodern return to history, and is variously influenced by Marxism, sociology, anthropology, and post-structuralist theories of language and subjectivity. It analyzes the struggle for legitimacy and recognition in Victorian institutions and the struggle over meanings in ideological representation of the gendered subject in texts. Contributors cover diverse topics, including Victorian ideologies of motherhood, the male gaze, the cult of the male child genius in narrative painting, the press, and Victorian women and the French Revolution, discussing both well-known and less familiar Victorian texts.