Equivocal Beings

Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s--Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen

By:

Claudia L. Johnson

Format:

Paperback / softback

Series:

Women in Culture & Society Series WCS

Show Hide Adult Content

$126.99

Available from supplier

Usually ships in 3-4 weeks

0 in Trolley

Price Match

Wrap this item as a gift ($5.90) - add a free gift card on the next page

Buy Now, Pay Later with:

4 payments of $31.75 with Afterpay Learn more

Availability

Delivering to:

Estimated arrival:

Around 7-19 June using International Courier

Description

In the wake of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke argued that civil order depended upon nurturing the sensibility of men—upon the masculine cultivation of traditionally feminine qualities such as sentiment, tenderness, veneration, awe, gratitude, and even prejudice. Writers as diverse as Sterne, Goldsmith, Burke, and Rousseau were politically motivated to represent authority figures as men of feeling, but denied women comparable authority by representing their feelings as inferior, pathological, or criminal. Focusing on Mary Wollstonecraft, Ann Radcliffe, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen, whose popular works culminate and assail this tradition, Claudia L. Johnson examines the legacy male sentimentality left for women of various political persuasions. Demonstrating the interrelationships among politics, gender, and feeling in the fiction of this period, Johnson provides detailed readings of Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, and Burney, and treats the qualities that were once thought to mar their work—grotesqueness, strain, and excess—as indices of ideological conflict and as strategies of representation during a period of profound political conflict. She maintains that the reactionary reassertion of male sentimentality as a political duty displaced customary gender roles, rendering women, in Wollstonecraft's words, "equivocal beings."

Author Biography:

Claudia L. Johnson is professor of English at Princeton University and the author of Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Release date Australia

June 15th, 1995

Author

Claudia L. Johnson

Audiences

Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Professional & Vocational
Undergraduate

Pages

256

Series

Women in Culture & Society Series WCS

Dimensions

17x23x2

ISBN-13

9780226401843

Product ID

10086348

Customer reviews

Nobody has reviewed this product yet. You could be the first!

Write a Review

Marketplace listings

There are no Marketplace listings available for this product currently.
Already own it? Create a free listing and pay just 9% commission when it sells!

Sell Yours Here

Get free delivery, exclusive deals, and more^*

Non-Fiction Books:

Equivocal Beings

By:

Format:

Series:

Buy Now, Pay Later with:

Availability

Description

Author Biography:

Customer reviews

Marketplace listings

Help & options

Filed under...

Get free delivery, exclusive deals, and more*

Buy Now, Pay Later with:

Author Biography:

Get free delivery, exclusive deals, and more^*