Los discursos de defensa femeninos en la narrativa española del siglo XV

From ancient times, female models were constructed that classified women as “good” and “bad”, considering how well they fit on the values socially legitimated. During the fifteenth century, debates about the role of women in society —querelles des femmes— took place in Europe. There different authors took a position as “defenders” or “attackers”. However, the proposed division in those debates, through which defense discourses for women were obtained, results to be apparent and responds better to a rhetoric necessity. The creation of legitimate defense is impossible due to the ideological presuppositions from which those discourses were developed. From this hypothesis, the paper proposes the analysis of some of these “female defenses” in Spain, both those constructed with rhetoric proposes (Triunfo de las Donas) and those developed in the sentimental fiction of the fifteenth century (Grimalte y Gradissa and Grisel y Mirabella).

Between Fiction and Physiology: Brain Fever in The Brothers Karamazov and Its English Afterlife

Working at the intersection of translation theory and medical humanities, this article interrogates the term brain fever, which Constance Garnett, adhering to clichés of English sentimental fiction, uses in reference to a wide variety of medical conditions in the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Garnett's choice has become useful shorthand for the narrative function of delirium in Dostoevsky's works, but it obscures the sensitivity to medical terminology that informs the Russian texts. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky stages the conflict between Enlightenment rationality and religious mysticism by satirizing the terminology of medical authorities and contrasting it with the language of faith, which posits its own etiology for mental diseases. Garnett's abundance of interpolated brain fevers can be read not as a simple mistranslation but as marking the roles of translation and diagnosis in mediating the various cultural paradigms produced in fictional worlds.

‘The Redundancy of Copious Nothings’

Eighteenth-century critics commonly used birth topoi to ridicule writing they believed to be uninspired or imitative, but their attacks on the bad form and excesses of women’s novels were particularly pointed. Novels were not so much authored as begotten—through suspect feminized spaces like the circulating library and the automatic reproduction of formulaic fiction. Such judgments were felt keenly by women writers, as evidenced by Frances Burney’s anxiety about the fate of her second offspring, Cecilia, and her prefatory allegory of authorial corruption at the Temple of Vanity. Vanity, it was suggested, was not only the motivating force behind women novelists’ endeavors, it might also be fostered through the reading of sentimental fiction. This essay explores the transmission of affect between women readers and writers, reframing the creative and destabilizing powers of vanity to argue that copious nothings divert readers and writers’ attention from domestic cares, disrupting the projections of masculine prerogative.

Realisms

Realism is a historical phenomenon that is not of the past. Its recurrent rises and falls only attest to its persistence as a measure of representational authority. Even as literary history has produced different moments of “realism wars,” over the politics of realist versus antirealist aesthetics, the demand to represent an often strange and changing reality—however contested a term that may be—guarantees realism’s ongoing critical future. Undoubtedly, realism has held a privileged position in the history of Western literary representation. Its fortunes are closely linked to the development of capitalist modernity, the rise of the novel, the emergence of the bourgeoisie, and the expansion of middle-class readerships with the literacy and leisure to read—and with an interest in reading about themselves as subjects. While many genealogies of realism are closely tied to the history of the rise of the novel—with Don Quixote as a point of departure—it is from its later, 19th-century forms that critical assumptions have emerged about its capacities and limitations. The 19th-century novel—whether its European or slightly later American version—is taken as the apex of the form and is tied to the rise of industrial capitalism, burgeoning ideas of social class, and expansion of empire. Although many of the realist writers of the 19th century were self-reflexive about the form, and often articulated theories of realism as distinct from romance and sentimental fiction, it was not until the mid-20th century, following the canonization of modernism in English departments, that a full-fledged critical analysis of realism as a form or mode would take shape. Our fullest articulations of realism therefore owe a great deal to its negative comparison to later forms—or, conversely, to the effort to resuscitate realism’s reputation against perceived critical oversimplifications. In consequence, there is no single definition of realism—nor even agreement on whether it is a mode, form, or genre—but an extraordinarily heterogenous set of ways of approaching it as a problem of representation. Standard early genealogies of realism are to be found in historical accounts such as Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel and György Lukács’ Theory of the Novel and The Historical Novel, with a guide to important critiques and modifications to be found in Michael McKeon’s Theory of the Novel. This article does not retrace those critical histories. Nor does it presume to address the full range of realisms in the modern arts, including painting, photography, film, and video and digital arts. It focuses on the changing status of realism in the literary landscape, uses the fault lines of contemporary critical debates about realism to refer back to some of the recurrent terms of realism/antirealism debates, and concludes with a consideration of the “return” to realism in the 21st century.

Sanctified Bodies: Christian Theology and Disability in Ellice Hopkins’s Rose Turquand and Charlotte Yonge’s The Pillars of the House

Comparing Ellice Hopkins’s Rose Turquand (1876) to Charlotte Yonge’s The Pillars of The House, or Underwode, Under Rode (1870–73), this chapter outlines how religion, form, and focalization interact in mid-Victorian Christian sentimental fiction to create discernible concepts of disability as corporealizing spirituality. Specifically, each author’s respective incarnational theology (the theology of Christ in human form) correlate substantially to the novels’ overarching narrative forms, Hopkins’s as a single-focus plot and Yonge’s as a multiple-focus plot. As a single-focus Bildungsroman that focalizes primarily through its heroine, Rose Turquand delineates spirituality and disability as individually experienced, depicting incarnation as the sanctification of the individual body through suffering. In contrast, The Pillars of the House’s multiple-focus family chronicle formulates religion and disability as communally experienced through interdependency as the locus for spiritual growth, reflecting Yonge’s Tractarian understanding of incarnation as existing through the Church as a community.

Tragic Sensibilities

This chapter considers the parallel development of bourgeois tragedy, genre serieux (the serious genre), and the era’s early sentimental literature. It reads Sarah Fielding’s pathbreaking sentimental novel, The Adventures of David Simple (1744), and Henry Fielding’s Amelia (1751) in light of the siblings’ close connection to the first generation of bourgeois tragedians in order to claim that sentimental fiction refigures tragedy’s aesthetic frames, with both adopting the tableau in order to invest simple, pathetic scenes of ordinary suffering with dignity. The chapter then considers how these formal elements navigate between realism, sentimentality, and ironic detachment by looking briefly at scenes from Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768), Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771), and Sophia Lee’s adaptation of Diderot’s Le Pere de famille (1758) as A Chapter of Accidents (1782). Finally, it considers this cultural and affective work in light of recent theories of “public intimacy.”

Laurence Sterne in the Romantic Anthology

This chapter describes the fictional forms by which Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey present confrontations between characters separated by differences of ethnicity, race, and species, particularly in episodes that were frequently republished in popular anthologies. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, readers encountered a version of Sterne’s sentimental fiction that is incompatible with a critical consensus about his novels. While Sterne has been understood to base subject-formation on the appropriation of another’s sentiments through the experience of sympathy, popular anthologized forms of his works, by contrast, emphasize emotional disturbance and preclude the return to a stable, narrating self. Anthologized versions of Sterne mobilize aspects of his original works—the structure of the frame tale, an interest in giving voice to figures of radical difference (including animals and former slaves), and the experience of shared affect and narrative—and specify Romantic-era fiction’s revision of sympathy.