1700s
1800s
A01=Claudia L. Johnson
academic
Author_Claudia L. Johnson
burke
Category=DSB
Category=DSBF
Category=DSK
Category=JBCC
civil
close reading
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
era
famous authors
female
feminine
feminism
feminist
fiction
french revolution
goldsmith
gratitude
historical
history
masculine
men
order
political
politics
popular
prejudice
research
roles
rousseau
scholarly
sentiment
sentimental
sterne
time period
tradition
udolpho
wanderer
women
womens issues
writers
Product details
- ISBN 9780226401843
- Weight: 397g
- Dimensions: 17 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 15 Jun 1995
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In the wake of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke argued that civil order depended upon the masculine cultivation of traditionally feminine qualities such as sentiment, tenderness, veneration, awe and gratitude. 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, this work 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, it 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.
The author maintains that the reactionary reassertion of male sentimentality as a political duty displaced customary gender roles, rendering women, in Wollstonecraft's words, "equivocal beings."
