From polemics to fiction: Four eighteenth-century women writers on education.
Item
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Title
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From polemics to fiction: Four eighteenth-century women writers on education.
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Identifier
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AAI9530876
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identifier
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9530876
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Creator
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Grossman, Joyce Ann.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Rachel Brownstein
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Date
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1995
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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, English | Education, History of
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Abstract
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The status of female education was vigorously debated in England throughout the eighteenth century; vehicles commonly used by women to persuade audiences were tracts and treatises. However, with the development of the novel, literary women found alternative means of conveying their reforming messages. Writers interpolated critiques of education into new and hybrid forms of the literature, some of which they invented themselves. This study concerns four women authors: Sarah Fielding (1710-68), Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97), Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849), and Elizabeth Inchbald (1753-1821), all of whom used a panoply of genres, including adult and juvenile novels, plays, stories, satires, educational manuals, and literary criticism, in order to express their ideas about education and to agitate for reform.;Sarah Fielding is treated as a feminist foremother of these 1790s women writers. Although she has been labelled a "sentimental novelist" several of her lesser-known texts are experimental fictions designed to accommodate her polemics; furthermore, Fielding's narrative techniques are integrally related to her choice of themes. Diverse works by Wollstonecraft, Edgeworth, and Inchbald are analyzed on the basis of similar criteria. So as to challenge the hegemonic position of the adult novel in twentieth-century criticism, fiction and non-fiction are contrasted, as well as adult and juvenile literature. Many of these writers defined themselves chiefly as moralists and pedagogues, and not as novelists; furthermore, they wrote during a century in which the novel was a fluid and unstable genre. Among those issues explored are women writers' attitudes toward boarding schools and other "fashionable" forms of education, their reservations about elitist forms of male education, the problems and opportunities they saw being posed by autodidacticism, and the specific programs they invented to redress educational imbalances. Most of their reforms were intended for the middling classes, although a spillover effect occurred when middle-class women reached out to help educate the laboring poor. I reconsider these authors' current reputations, arguing that labels such as "radical" and "conservative" become less relevant when their ideas are contextualized within the history of English education and analyzed without generic preferences.
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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.
