Between the Theater and the Novel

Chapter 4 investigates the domestic novel as a literary form in which the woman as protagonist and the site of the household come to the fore as subject and scene of modernity. It concentrates on novels by two of the form’s pre-eminent practitioners in English and Chinese, Jane Austen and Eileen Chang, who have drawn comparisons to each other for their clear, even cold-eyed, depictions of social and economic constraints on femininity and the complexity of feminine interiority. It reads together Austen’s 1814 Mansfield Park and Chang’s 1967 novels, Yuannü and The Rouge of the North, rewritings of her 1943 novella Jinsuo ji. These novels show how changes in the articulation of femininity in different historical and cultural contexts take place in correlation to redefinitions of the status of the household itself as site of modern life. Each novel incorporates the medium of theater to restage “woman” as modern agent and spectatorial subject on the plane of the ordinary.

On the Horizon of World Literature

This book compares Romantic England and Republican China as asynchronous moments of incipient literary modernity in different lifeworlds. These moments were oriented alike by “world literature” as a discursive framework of classifications that connected and re-organized local articulations of literary histories and literary modernities. The book examines select literary forms—the literary manifesto, the tale collection, the familiar essay, and the domestic novel—as textual sites for the enactment of new socio-political forms-of-life. These forms function as testing grounds for questions of both literary-aesthetic and socio-political importance: What does it mean to attain a voice? What is a common reader? How does one dwell in the ordinary? What is a woman? In different languages, activating heterogeneous literary and philosophical traditions, the texts analyzed explore by literary means the far-from-settled problem of what it means to be modern in different lifeworlds and ongoing traditions. Authors studied include Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lu Xun, Charles and Mary Lamb, Lin Shu, Zhou Zuoren, Jane Austen, and Eileen Chang. This book contributes to the fields of comparative literature, British Romanticism, and modern Chinese literature.

Sex, Violence, and Religion in the Irish-American Domestic Novel

This chapter compares post-war Irish-American domestic novels by male and female authors, examining the influence of politics, assimilation, and ethnic identity on their plots and characters. Focusing on representative novels per decade from the 1940s to the present, the analysis finds that while both male and female writers agree that married life rarely equals domestic bliss, the authors’ gender identity determines their representation of the roles played by marriage, sexuality, and religion. The first part of the chapter examines the preponderance of adultery and gendered abuse; the second discusses attitudes towards women, sex, and sexual preference; and the third traces the movement from immigrant piety to an intellectual, independent view of the Church that acknowledges its ongoing gender hierarchy. The discussion not only reveals the progression of Irish Americans’ fictional lives since the 1940s but also examines the role of Irish-American women writers in expanding that view.

The Rights of Beasts in the Early Nineteenth Century

This chapter argues that the parliamentary animal welfare campaign of the early nineteenth century, culminating in Martin’s Act (1822), was the heir to the radical movements of the 1790s. The literary representation of animals as feeling subjects, and the complex relationship between human and animal rights, both had profound effects on the anti-cruelty debate. Focusing on contributions by John Lawrence, an early exponent of legal rights for animals, Thomas Erskine, who introduced an unsuccessful Cruelty to Animals bill in 1809, and Margaret Cullen, who brought the debate about animals into the domestic novel, I show how they used and adapted radical political ideas in the service of animal welfare. The literature of animal subjectivity underpinned the anti-cruelty campaign and helped achieve legislation; but success depended on melding new attitudes with old hierarchies and turning away from the more radical implications of the reassessment of animal life.

‘Full of pretty stories’: Fiction in the Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832)

Magazine fiction in eighteenth-century periodical publications such as the Lady’s Magazine has, on the whole, been disparaged as unoriginal, derivative work produced by amateurs. Jenny DiPlacidi’s essay robustly contests these claims by demonstrating how a range of sentimental, Gothic, epistolary and experimental short and serial fiction in the Magazine thematically, tonally and stylistically influenced the novels of canonical figures such as Jane Austen, Frances Burney and Charlotte Smith. Magazine fiction in periodicals such as the Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832) and Lady’s Monthly Museum (1798–1828), DiPlacidi argues, was, in the main, innovative and original. Far from being ephemeral, this fiction was an enduring and significant cultural form, which stylistically and thematically helped to shape the Romantic and domestic novel.