scholarly journals Adeline Mowbray, or, the bitter acceptance of woman's fate

2010 ◽  
pp. 187
Author(s):  
Aída Díaz Bild
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Married Women ◽  
Important Task ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Patriarchal System ◽  
Companionate Marriage ◽  
The Ideal

Eighteenth-century women writers believed that the novel was the best vehicle to educate women and offer them a true picture of their lives and “wrongs”. Adelina Mowbray is the result of Opie’s desire to fulfil this important task. Opie does not try to offer her female readers alternatives to their present predicament or an idealized future, but makes them aware of the fact that the only ones who get victimized in a patriarchal system are always the powerless, that is to say, women. She gives us a dark image of the vulnerability of married women and points out not only how uncommon the ideal of companionate marriage was in real life, but also the difficulty of finding the appropriate partner for an egalitarian relationship. Lastly, she shows that there is now social forgiveness for those who transgress the established boundaries, which becomes obvious in the attitude of two of the most compassionate and generous characters of the novel, Rachel Pemberton and Emma Douglas, towards Adelina.

The Philosophy of Nature in Diderot and Rousseau

2020 ◽  
pp. 81-141
Author(s):  
Tili Boon Cuillé
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Denis Diderot ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Ideal Model ◽  
Histoire Naturelle ◽  
Moral Sensibility ◽  
Alternate Forms ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
The Ideal

Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were avid readers of Buffon’s Histoire naturelle and active participants in the quarrels prompted by Rameau’s operas. To date, scholarship has focused primarily on their theorization of physiological and moral sensibility. Chapter 2 investigates Diderot’s and Rousseau’s response to the spectacle of nature, focusing on the affinity between the inspiration of the artist and the identification of the spectator. Jan Goldstein has characterized “enthusiasm” and “imagination” as eighteenth-century smear words. These terms are recuperated in Diderot’s writings on painting and the theater and Rousseau’s writings on opera and the novel, however. Enthusiasm, like pity, necessitates a movement outside oneself that facilitates union with the other and the forging of the ideal model. The chapter concludes by considering the alternate forms of natural spectacle that Diderot and Rousseau envision in their writings.

scholarly journals Pleas for Respectability: Eighteenth-Century Women Writers Theorizing the Novel

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-26
Author(s):  
Amelia Precup
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Past ◽  
Modern Novel ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

Abstract The emergence and development of the modern novel used to be viewed as a largely masculine affair. However, over the past few decades, researchers and scholars have started to re-evaluate and acknowledge the importance of women’s literary and theoretical work to the rise and evolution of the genre. This article adds to these revisionist efforts by contributing to the ongoing discussion on the theoretical legacy left by some of the most notable British women writers of the long eighteenth century. The article analyses several texts (prefaces, dedications, dialogues, essays, reviews) in which they expressed their perspectives on questions situated at the core of the eighteenth-century debates concerning the novel. The critical and theoretical perspectives advanced by these writers are approached as contributions to the novel’s status as a respectable literary genre and, implicitly, as self-legitimizing efforts.

scholarly journals Perceptions of Marriage and Human Relationships in Jane Austen’s Novel Emma

2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (32) ◽  
pp. 65
Author(s):  
Eljvira Kica
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
Marriage Market ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Married Women ◽  
Male Dominance ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
The Real ◽  
The People

Emma is a novel written by Jane Austen, which is based on real- life situations of the eighteenth century England. Austen depicts her novels to show clearly the customs and traditions that people had to use in order to get married; her dissatisfaction towards all these conditions; male dominance and also the consideration of women as weak human beings with limited rights. Based on all these issues, Austen chooses different kinds of marriages, mainly based on economical interest. Most of the people in her novels see the marriage as an obligation which had to be fulfilled; most of the girls got involved into a marriage market where parents decided what was good or bad for them. This paper describes the conditions of unmarried and married women Emma; the ways how the unmarried women chose the partners; the ways how Austen compared the conditions of women with the real life situations of the eighteenth century Britain; how she used irony to show her dissatisfaction towards the traditions of that time, and also the real message she conveys to the world.

scholarly journals The concept of “neo” and the novels of G. Rodenbach: between romanticism and symbolism

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 682-691
Author(s):  
Ninel A. Litvinenko
Keyword(s):  
Real Life ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Stage Of Development ◽  
Novel Synthesis ◽  
Transitional Phenomenon ◽  
Romantic Novel ◽  
French Poetry ◽  
The Ideal

Various forms of transition in literature and art of the turn of 19th and 20th centuries havent been explored enough. The use of the concept of neo allows to clarify the ideas of neo-romanticism that have developed in modern science. The article analyzes the novel heritage of the Belgian writer Rodenbach as a transitional phenomenon that brings together the writer's tetralogy with romanticism, Parnassus and symbolist French poetry; as well as phenomenon that organically includes Belgian literature in the European space of intertextuality. It is proved that addressing the problems of art, the artist-creator, the beautiful soul, connects Rodenbach with the traditions of Yens romanticism, at a new stage of development of literature generates a transformation of the myth of romanticism. The ideal of art is not subject to devaluation, but the artist, who lives in society, always fails. Indulging in earthly passion, coming into conflict with society and himself, he doesnt keep faith in his beliefs. Real life creates illusions and self-deception, leading the character to disaster. Rodenbach uses a romantic model of mythologization, saturating it with symbolic allusions and signs, on the eve of modernism creates a neo-romantic novel synthesis.

scholarly journals Del héroe romántico al “feminized man” o de la realidad a la fantasía

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aída Díaz Bild
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Alternative Model ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Dominant Male ◽  
Sentimental Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Conduct Books ◽  
Las Mujeres ◽  
Freedom Of Action

ResumenUna de las maneras en las que las mujeres escritoras del siglo XVIII subvierten el discurso de la novela sentimental es creando un tipo de amor alternativo y un héroe que es una excepción a la regla patriarcal, el denominado “feminized man”. Este amante ideal refl eja la ternura, sensibilidad, amabilidad y auto-control que normalmente se asocia con las mujeres y está dispuesto a recortar su poder y derechos para sancionar la independencia y autonomía de la heroína. Se huye así del estereotipo agresivo y dominante que encontramos en las novelas y manuales de conducta de la época y que supone una amenaza para las mujeres, ya que invade su espacio, coartando su libertad de acción y pensamiento. Detrás de la creación de este nuevo héroe está, por supuesto, el deseo de cambiar las relaciones de poder dentro de la pareja. Tanto el amante apasionado como el nuevo “feminized man” están presentes en Memoirs of Modern Philosphers, demostrando así que la novela no puede clasifi carse meramente como anti-jacobina o conservadora, sino que contiene elementos claramente subversivos.Palabras clave: “Feminized man”, amante apasionado, matrimonio, poder, fantasía.AbstractOne way in which eighteenth-century women writers subvert the discourse of the sentimental novel is by creating an alternative model of love and a hero who proves to be an exception to the patriarchal rule. This ideal lover shows the tenderness, sensibility, kindness and self-control that we usually associate with women and is willing to curtail his power and rights in order to sanction the heroine’s independence and autonomy. Thus the stereotype of the aggressive and dominant male which prevailed in the novels and conduct books of the age is avoided: he represents a threat to women, since he invades their space, encroaching on their freedom of action and thought. Behind the creation of this new hero is, of course, the desire to bring about a change in the power relations between the sexes. Both the passionate lover and the new “feminized man” are present in Memoirs of Modern Philosphers, thus showing that the novel cannot be merely classifi ed as anti-jacobin or conservative, but clearly contains subversive elements.Key words: “Feminized man”, passionate lover, marriage, power, fantasy.

Distributed Cognition and Women Writers’ Representation of Theatre in Eighteenth-Century England: ‘Thoroughly to unfold the labyrinths of the human mind’

2019 ◽  
pp. 170-186
Author(s):  
Ros Ballaster
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Distributed Cognition ◽  
Extended Mind ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sarah Fielding ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cognitive Experience ◽  
The Mind

Readers in the mid-eighteenth century were increasingly invited to translate their knowledge about the social extension of mind learned in the experience of theatre to ‘new’ prose forms of the periodical and the novel. Women writers in these forms found opportunity to present women as cognitive agents rather than affective vehicles. Four works by women serve to illustrate this case: Eliza Haywood’s The Dramatic Historiographer (1735), Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier’s The Cry: a new dramatic fable (1754), Charlotte Lennox’s Shakespeare Illustrated (1753-4), and Frances Brooke’s The Old Maid (1755-6). These printed prose works invoke memories of performance – the co-presence of the real bodies of audience and actors. But they often do so to claim the superior cognitive experience of the reader’s engagement through print with a fictional persona in the ‘mind’. The prose work is imagined as a repository of socially extended mind for its audience, an opportunity not only to recreate the experience of communal consumption of the artwork which theatre affords, but also to provide a more sophisticated form of narrative scaffolding. Distance and reflection are enabled by the absence of the performer’s body and the judicious authority of a framing narrator.

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