
Seductive Forms
Women's Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740
Ros Ballaster(Author)
Oxford University Press
Published on 2. April 1998
Book
Paperback/Softback
240 pages
978-0-19-818477-5 (ISBN)
Description
Historicist and feminist accounts of the `rise of the novel' have neglected the phenomenon of the professional woman writer in England prior to the advent of the sentimental novel in the 1740s. Seductive Forms explores the means by which the three leading Tory women novelists of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries challenged and reworked both contemporary gender ideologies and generic convention. The seduction plot provided Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood with a vehicle for dramatizing their own appropriation of the `masculine' power of fiction-making. Seduction is employed in these fictions as a metaphor for both novelistic production (the seduction of the reader by the writer) and party political machination (the seduction of the public by the politician). This challenging and lively book also explores the debts early prose fiction owed to French seventeenth-century models of fiction-writing and argues that Behn, Manley, and Haywood succeed in producing a distinctively `English' and female `form' for the amatory novel.
Reviews / Votes
...an extraordinary rich and interesting book...the range of sources is extensive, the readings provocative, and the grasp of the relation between text and culture both assured and suggestive. And, again characteristically, the subtlety of the feminist theory she deploys allows a persuasive new reading of the problematic 'rise of the novel'. * Review of English Studies *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Oxford
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 13 mm
Weight
313 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-19-818477-5 (9780198184775)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
07/1992
1st Edition
OUP eBook
€38.49
Available for download
Person
Author
Fellow in English LiteratureFellow in English Literature, Mansfield College, Oxford
Content
PART I: GENDER AND GENRE ; PART II: WOMEN WRITERS