Werewolf Wollstonecraft

2020 ◽  
pp. 253-274
Author(s):  
Chris Washington
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Feminist Critique ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Gender Identities ◽  
Dynamic Power ◽  
Karen Barad

The judicial bestiary at the heart of eighteenth-century politics has long been evident in Enlightenment social contract debates, as Michel Foucault’s and Giorgio Agamben’s theories of biopolitics show. In this essay, I argue that Wollstonecraft is nonetheless the first thinker of ‘true’ werewolf out-lawry in her final novel, Maria, Or the Wrongs of Woman and in her letters to Godwin. In the novel, Wollstonecraft leverages what we now call new materialism as a feminist critique of heteropatriarchal society. Wollstonecraft’s new materialist thinking also scrambles gender across even human and nonhuman distinctions. To counter microcosmic familial and macrocosmic state heteropatriarchy, Wollstonecraft theorizes what I am calling, following the example of wolves and werewolves, not a family but a ‘pack’. The pack manifests as new spacetimes through what Karen Barad terms “quantum entanglements” that produce love between subjects and subjects but that never strives to reproduce binaristic pairings that reproduce the sovereign family. A pack, as Wollstonecraft’s texts demonstrate, emerges from processes of co-creation that iterate new subjects and objects without dynamic power structures structured around stable gender identities or human and nonhuman power relations.

Jane Austen’s Questioning of Gender and Genres

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie-Laure MASSEI-CHAMAYOU
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Conduct Books ◽  
Northanger Abbey ◽  
Gothic Novels ◽  
Opposite View

If Jane Austen admits in her correspondence that she was eventually pleased with Thomas Gisborne’s Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (1797), the Anglican theologian nonetheless endorsed the prejudices shared by most eighteenth-century moralists towards novels. Now, in Northanger Abbey, a novel filled with literary allusions, Jane Austen’s narrator bravely takes the opposite view by launching into a bold defence of the genre. Besides resorting to a biting irony to scrutinize her society’s axioms, rules and power relations, her novels notably question Manichean representations of masculine and feminine roles. Jane Austen’s choice to distance herself from the strictly gendered models inherited from conduct books, sentimental, or gothic novels, further combines with her questioning of generic conventions. This article thus aims at exploring how Jane Austen engaged with these representations while articulating her subtle didacticism. Her aim was not merely to raise the respectability of the novel genre, but also to provide a possible answer to the crisis of values that was threatening the very foundations of the political and social order.

scholarly journals UNHEARD VOICES AND COUNTER DISCOURSE, A STUDY OF THE MARCH BY E.L. DOCTOROW; WITH SPECIAL REGARDS TO ALAN SINFIELD’S THEORIES OF DISSIDENCE

2018 ◽  
pp. 105-120
Author(s):  
Zohreh Ramin ◽  
Sajjad Ghanbari
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Historical Event ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Dominant Ideology ◽  
Dominant Ideologies ◽  
Fault Lines ◽  
Sherman's March

There have been many texts and writings which show the resistances against dominant power and ideology. Texts offer glimpses of resistances and deviancies and their outcomes in the society. According to Foucault's theories, texts can be investigated to reveal the power relations in them and how power reacts to such deviancies. Literary texts can be viewed as sources where dominant ideologies, beliefs, opinions and ideas can be found. This can be more interesting when texts refer to an important event in history. The March is about historical event of General Sherman's march through America. Doctorow's text offers some resistances and dissidences against conventional ways of acting and behaving. But Sinfield believes that this representation of resistances in texts can show some fault-lines in power relations and create some gaps in power structures. These gaps can be considered as threat for dominant ideology. Doctorow tries to highlight such gaps in the society which he reveals in the novel.

In Waiting

The Server ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 124-166
Author(s):  
Markus Krajewski
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Mimetic Desire ◽  
The World

This chapter explains the figure of the servant in literature. The focus here is on the eighteenth century, via a close reading of Miss Sara Sampson. Paying close attention to Goethe's long list of servants (and especially to his valet Carl Stadelmann), the chapter examines the articulation of power relations between master and subject and, further, the topos of the world upside down, which threatens to turn those power structures on their head. The chapter concludes with a discussion of mimetic desire. Using examples from Goethe and Proust, it shows not merely how servants mimic the behavior of their masters but also how the actions subalterns imitate come to affect, in turn, the models set by their superiors.

scholarly journals Begæret efter stoflighed. Materialitet, begrænsninger og begær i “Madame Bovary”

2017 ◽  
Vol 32 (77) ◽  
Author(s):  
Signe Leth Gammelgaard
Keyword(s):  
New Materialism ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Madame Bovary ◽  
Karen Barad ◽  
Materialist Theory ◽  
Capitalist Ideology

Signe Leth Gammelgaard: “Desiring Matter: Materiality, Constraints and Desire in Madame Bovary”This article analyses similarities between Flaubert’s stylistics in Madame Bovary and the theories of new materialism, in particular the work of Karen Barad. Drawing upon earlier readings of the novel by Schor, Danius, Starobinski and Rancière this reading centers on the motif of boundaries and their dissolvement and it argues that the novel highlights a feeling of disappointment or frustration with a world that does not always move according to human will. The article goes on to examine how Emma’s money plot conjoins with the theory of active materiality, and to speculate on the relation between capitalist ideology and new materialist theory. Finally, two critiques of new materialism are discussed, stressing the importance of the notion of boundaries.

Design, power and colonisation: decolonial and anti-oppressive explorations on three approaches for Design for Sustainability

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas B. TORRETTA ◽  
Lizette REITSMA
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Design For Sustainability ◽  
The People ◽  
Reflexive Practice ◽  
Cross Country ◽  
Design Power ◽  
Relational Issue

Our contemporary world is organized in a modern/colonial structure. As people, professions and practices engage in cross-country Design for Sustainability (DfS), projects have the potential of sustaining or changing modern/colonial power structures. In such project relations, good intentions in working for sustainability do not directly result in liberation from modern/colonial power structures. In this paper we introduce three approaches in DfS that deal with power relations. Using a Freirean (1970) decolonial perspective, we analyse these approaches to see how they can inform DfS towards being decolonial and anti-oppressive. We conclude that steering DfS to become decolonial or colonizing is a relational issue based on the interplay between the designers’ position in the modern/colonial structure, the design approach chosen, the place and the people involved in DfS. Hence, a continuous critical reflexive practice is needed in order to prevent DfS from becoming yet another colonial tool.

Restoration Theatre and the Novel

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Davidson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Transition ◽  
Strong Affinity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Restoration Theatre ◽  
Restoration Comedy ◽  
London Stage

This chapter explores the broad cultural transition from drama to novel during the Restoration period, which triggered one of the most productive periods in the history of the London stage. However, when it comes to the eighteenth century proper, the novel is more likely to be identified as the century's most significant and appealing popular genre. The chapter considers why the novel has largely superseded drama as the literary form to which ambitious and imaginative literary types without a strong affinity for verse writing would by default have turned their attention and energies by the middle of the eighteenth century. Something important may have been lost in the broad cultural transition from drama to novel. This chapter, however, contends that many things were preserved: that the novel was able to absorb many of the functions and techniques not just of Restoration comedy but of the theatre more generally.

The Female Quixote

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Lennox ◽  
Margaret Anne Doody
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Women's Literature ◽  
Samuel Johnson ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Charlotte Lennox

The Female Quixote (1752), a vivacious and ironical novel parodying the style of Cervantes, portrays the beautiful and aristocratic Arabella, whose passion for reading romances leads her into all manner of misunderstandings. Praised by Fielding, Richardson and Samuel Johnson, the book quickly established Charlotte Lennox as a foremost writer of the Novel of Sentiment. With an excellent introduction and full explanatory notes, this edition will be of particular interest to students of women's literature, and of the eighteenth-century novel.

Tom Jones

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Fielding
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fourth Edition ◽  
Tom Jones ◽  
History Of

Fielding's comic masterpiece of 1749 was immediately attacked as `A motley history of bastardism, fornication, and adultery'. Indeed, his populous novel overflows with a marvellous assortment of prudes, whores, libertines, bumpkins, misanthropes, hypocrites, scoundrels, virgins, and all too fallible humanitarians. At the centre of one of the most ingenious plots in English fiction stands a hero whose actions were, in 1749, as shocking as they are funny today. Expelled from Mr Allworthy's country estate for his wild temper and sexual conquests, the good-hearted foundling Tom Jones loses his money, joins the army, and pursues his beloved across Britain to London, where he becomes a kept lover and confronts the possibility of incest. Tom Jones is rightly regarded as Fielding's greatest work, and one of the first and most influential of English novels. This carefully modernized edition is based on Fielding's emended fourth edition text and offers the most thorough notes, maps, and bibliography. The introduction uses the latest scholarship to examine how Tom Jones exemplifies the role of the novel in the emerging eighteenth-century public sphere.

Germaine de Staël’s and the Early Usage of Improvisation in English

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Simpson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
New Information

This chapter describes the emergence of the terminology of improvisation in the English language. Terms relating to improvisation began to appear in the eighteenth century and came to be used frequently in the nineteenth. Germaine de Staël’s 1807 novel Corinne ou L’Italie (published in French and translated into English the same year) was an important part of this emergence of improvisation. By attending to the content and language of Corinne, including the novel’s earliest translations, the chapter argues that the novel helped create a sense of improvisation as an Italianate artistic practice with political overtones specific to the context of the Napoleonic Wars. For the Staëlian improviser, art and history alike progress not toward pre-ordained goals but by taking new information into account and improvising new ends.

Identity propaganda: Racial narratives and disinformation

2021 ◽  
pp. 146144482110292
Author(s):  
Madhavi Reddi ◽  
Rachel Kuo ◽  
Daniel Kreiss
Keyword(s):  
Presidential Election ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Vice President ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Marginalized Groups ◽  
Identity Based ◽  
Us Presidential Election ◽  
Social Orders ◽  
Racial Narratives

This article develops the concept of “identity propaganda,” or narratives that strategically target and exploit identity-based differences in accord with pre-existing power structures to maintain hegemonic social orders. In proposing and developing the concept of identity propaganda, we especially aim to help researchers find new insights into their data on misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda by outlining a framework for unpacking layers of historical power relations embedded in the content they analyze. We focus on three forms of identity propaganda: othering narratives that alienate and marginalize non-white or non-dominant groups; essentializing narratives that create generalizing tropes of marginalized groups; and authenticating narratives that call upon people to prove or undermine their claims to be part of certain groups. We demonstrate the utility of this framework through our analysis of identity propaganda around Vice President Kamala Harris during the 2020 US presidential election.

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