Law, Sensibility and the Sublime in Eighteenth-Century Women's Fiction
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A01=Sue Chaplin
act
aesthetic
Author_Sue Chaplin
Category=DSB
Category=DSK
Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya
Civil Society
Dacre's Zofloya
discourse
Eighteenth Century Aesthetic Discourse
Eighteenth Century Women's Fiction
eighteenth-century gender studies
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
female
Female Legal Subject
Female Quixote
feminist interpretations of sensibility
feminist literary theory
Fen Wick
gothic fiction criticism
Hardwicke Act
Hardwicke Marriage Act
Harlowe Family
Infanticide Statute
legal
legal discourse analysis
marriage
Married Women
Material Transcendence
Miss Sidney Bidulph
object
possibility
Romance Fiction
subject
subjectivity in women's writing
Sublime Object
Sublime Possibility
Sublime Terror
Terror Writing
transcendental
Transcendental Sublime
Transgressive Subject
trauma and ontology
Violated
Water Falling
Young Man
Product details
- ISBN 9780754633068
- Weight: 490g
- Dimensions: 153 x 219mm
- Publication Date: 27 Apr 2004
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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This work offers, firstly, a fresh historical, philosophical and cultural interpretation of the relation between the eighteenth-century discourse of sensibility, the sublime, and the theory and practice of eighteenth-century law. Secondly, the work exposes and explores the influence of this combination of discourses upon the formation of gender identities in this period. The author argues that it is only through a study of the convergence of these key eighteenth-century discourses that changing conceptualisations of femininity can fully be understood. Thirdly, it examines the presence, within eighteenth-century fiction by women, of a new female subject. Novels by women in this period, Chaplin posits, begin to reveal that the female subject position constructed through the discourses of law, sensibility and the sublime gives rise, for women, to a feminine ontological crisis that may be seen to anticipate by two hundred years the trauma of the 'post modern' male subject unable to present a unified subjectivity to himself or to the world. This feminine crisis finds expression within a range of female fiction of the mid-to-late eighteenth century - in Charlotte Lennox's anti-romance satire, Frances Sheridan's 'conduct-book' novels, the Gothic romances of Radcliffe and Eliza Fenwick and the sensationalistic horror fiction of Charlotte Dacre. Concentrating upon these writers, Chaplin argues that their works 'speak of dread' on behalf of women in this period and to varying degrees challenge discourses that construct femininity as a highly unstable, barely tenable subject position. Combining the works of Lyotard and Irigaray to formulate a new feminist reading of the eighteenth-century discourse of the sublime, this study offers fresh insights into the culture and politics of the eighteenth century. It presents highly original readings of well-known and lesser-known literary texts that interrogate from fresh perspectives the complex theoretical issues pertaining to
Sue Chaplin is a Lecturer in English at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK.
