How did the creation of the "Other" woman in English narratives contribute to the displacement of sexuality onto the exotic or savage woman? How did this cultural invention reinforce the cult of domesticity at home? What were the social and economic forces driving the process? Considering issues of Empire in relation to literary texts of the 18th century, this text offers a revision of the history of feminism in a postcolonial context. It argues that the need to control women's sexuality in 18th-century England intensified as the demands of trade and colonization required an ever-larger, able-bodied population. Describing how women's reproductive labour was harnessed to that task, the author explores issues such as the production of life, of goods, and of desire. She also considers a variety of cultural practices (usually construed as exotic) in England and the Empire, including polygamy, infanticide, prostitution, homoeroticism and arranged marriages. The book includes readings of texts by and about female subjects, including novels by Defoe, Richardson, Johnson, Cleland, Lennox, Sarah Scott, Frances Sheridan, and Phebe Gibbes.
It also considers the more broadly defined texts of culture such as travel narratives, medical documents, legal records and engravings.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
"Scholars of the emergent empire in the 18th century should see sexuality in terms of feminism's internal structures and its 'Othering'. Nussbaum discusses polygamy in African narratives and in England, examining Mary Wollstonecraft's work, Anna Falconbridge's narrative of her voyages to Sierra Leone, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's description of her time in Turkey. She also looks at prostitution, romance, sati, and a variety of other subjects found in travel literature, thereby providing a view of both the Englishwomen and the Other woman...Nussbaum succeeds in making the 'ideological working of empire and Englishwomen's complicity within it more legible."--A. Jenkins,'Choice' "Self-consciously exemplifies what a feminist new historicism would look like; Nussbaum's introduction and opening two chapters technically but clearly lay out a fresh approach to eighteenth-century writing about the self and to autobiography in general."--Mitzi Myers, 'Women's Review of Books' "An exemplary model of political criticism."--Shawn Lisa Maurer, 'Eighteenth-Century Fiction'
Reihe
Sprache
Verlagsort
Zielgruppe
Für höhere Schule und Studium
Für Beruf und Forschung
Maße
Höhe: 216 mm
Breite: 140 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-0-8018-5074-5 (9780801850745)
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Schweitzer Klassifikation
Felicity A. Nussbaum is professor of English and Women's Studies at Syracuse University. Her books include 'The Brink of All We Hate', 'The New Eighteenth Century', and 'The Autobiographical Subject', the later a co-recipient of the 1989 Louis Gottschalk Prize of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and available from Johns Hopkins.
