Eighteenth-Century Women Writers and the Gentleman's Liberation Movement
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€198.40
A01=Megan A. Woodworth
Author_Megan A. Woodworth
British literary feminism
Category=DSBF
Category=DSK
Civic Humanist
Civic Humanist Virtue
Compleat English Gentleman
Courtship Plot
domestic virtue theory
Eighteenth Century Women Writers
Enlightenment political thought
Enlightenment Stadial Theory
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Falconer Family
gender roles eighteenth century
Good Man
Gossip's Story
Henry Powerscourt
Lady Bradshaigh
Lady Honoria
Landed Men
Lord Colambre
Lord Glenthorn
Mansfield Park
Masculine Empire
masculinity studies
Modern English Masculinity
Mortimer Delvile
Percy Sons
RMI
Sentimental Family
Sir John Belmont
war and gender relations
Wind Mills
women writers redefining masculinity
Young Man
Product details
- ISBN 9781409427803
- Weight: 589g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 28 Nov 2011
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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In the late eighteenth-century English novel, the question of feminism has usually been explored with respect to how women writers treat their heroines and how they engage with contemporary political debates, particularly those relating to the French Revolution. Megan Woodworth argues that women writers' ideas about their own liberty are also present in their treatment of male characters. In positing a 'Gentleman's Liberation Movement,' she suggests that Frances Burney, Charlotte Smith, Jane West, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen all used their creative powers to liberate men from the very institutions and ideas about power, society, and gender that promote the subjection of women. Their writing juxtaposes the role of women in the private spheres with men's engagement in political structures and successive wars for independence (the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic Wars). The failures associated with fighting these wars and the ideological debates surrounding them made plain, at least to these women writers, that in denying the universality of these natural freedoms, their liberating effects would be severely compromised. Thus, to win the same rights for which men fought, women writers sought to remake men as individuals freed from the tyranny of their patriarchal inheritance.
A Visiting Scholar at the Gregg Centre for the Study of War and Society, University of New Brunswick, Megan Woodworth also teaches at UNB and St. Thomas University.
