Seductive Forms
Women's Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740
1st Edition
Published on 2. July 1992
241 pages
978-0-19-165651-4 (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.
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Content
- Introduction
- Part I: Gender and Genre
- 1: The Rise of the Novel: Gender and Genre in Theories of Prose Fiction
- 2: Observing the Forms: Amatory Fiction and the Construction of a Female Reader
- Part II: Women Writers
- 3: `A Devil on't, the Woman Damns the Poet': Aphra Behn's Fictions of Feminine Identity
- 4: `A Genius for Love': Sex as Politics in Delarivier Manley's Scandal Fiction
- 5: `Preparatives to Love': Fiction as Seduction in Eliza Haywood's Amatory Prose
- Conclusion: The Decline of Amatory Fiction: Re(de)fining the Female Form
- Bibliography
- Index
