Rethinking realism: Early women novelists in England and France.
Item
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Title
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Rethinking realism: Early women novelists in England and France.
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Identifier
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AAI9207108
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identifier
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9207108
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Creator
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O'Driscoll, Sally.
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Contributor
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Co-Advisers: Robert Adams Day | Nancy K. Miller
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Date
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1991
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, Comparative | Literature, English | Literature, Romance
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Abstract
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Literary critics writing on the early novel have defined the essential novelistic element, realism, in such a way as to exclude women writers from serious consideration. After examining the definitions of realism in England and France during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, this study introduces the concept of "female realism" as a way to rethink the boundaries of the novel genre and to reintegrate the contributions of women writers into its history. The narrative conventions of female realism are illustrated through close textual analysis of neglected novels by women writers. This reassessment of women's writing revises the assumption of traditional histories of the novel.;Chapter 1 examines how the concept of realism is understood in current literary criticism; it then surveys definitions of the term in eighteenth-century literary critical documents. Eighteenth-century attitudes toward women's writings are inextricably linked to corresponding constraints on female sexuality; twentieth-century criticism appears to retain some eighteenth-century moral judgments.;In Chapter 2, two novels are analyzed: Aphra Behn's Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684) and Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni's Lettres de Mistriss Fanni Butlerd (1757). The chapter focuses on the construction in the text of the female protagonist as "social subject".;Chapter 3 discusses intertextuality in women's writing, through the examples of two novels that use the same plot to different effects: Riccoboni's Le Marquis de Cressy (1758) and Eliza Haywood's Love in Excess (1719).;Chapter 4 surveys current Freudian theories of plot and suggests alternative "female" plot patterns, which are demonstrated through readings of Claudine-Alexandrine de Tencin's Les Malheurs de l'amour (1727), Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple Story (1791), and Haywood's The British Recluse (1722).;Chapter 5 examines the particular use women writers make of parody and satire for social critique. The novels discussed are Mary Davys' The Accomplish'd Rake (1727), Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote, Isabelle de Charriere's Lettres de Mistriss Henley (1785) and Francoise de Graffigny's Lettres d'une Peruvienne (1747).
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
