J. Rixey Ruffin
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780195326512
- eISBN:
- 9780199870417
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195326512.003.0009
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
By the middle of the 1790s Bentley was arrayed against classical liberalism in both its Christian and its economic forms. Those forms had in fact come together in a newly powerful symbiosis, both in ...
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By the middle of the 1790s Bentley was arrayed against classical liberalism in both its Christian and its economic forms. Those forms had in fact come together in a newly powerful symbiosis, both in the tangible sense of the Federalist Party and in the ideological sense of encouraging a mutually beneficial confluence of self‐defined morality, wealth, and divine pleasure. If Birmingham in 1791 and then the embargo in 1794 had begun the schism between Bentley and his liberal peers, Thomas Paine's Age of Reason finalized it. Bentley was not a deist, but Christian naturalism was ontologically no different than deism. So he was lumped in with Paine as a threat to Christianity by supernaturalists who themselves had decided to put aside their soteriological differences and unite against the philosophical threat. The second half of the decade brought more radicalism yet, most notably the writings of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, just when Federalist fears and their resultant sedition laws aimed more suspicion yet at men like William Bentley. By 1800, a defensive Bentley's transformation from classical liberal to republican was complete.Less
By the middle of the 1790s Bentley was arrayed against classical liberalism in both its Christian and its economic forms. Those forms had in fact come together in a newly powerful symbiosis, both in the tangible sense of the Federalist Party and in the ideological sense of encouraging a mutually beneficial confluence of self‐defined morality, wealth, and divine pleasure. If Birmingham in 1791 and then the embargo in 1794 had begun the schism between Bentley and his liberal peers, Thomas Paine's Age of Reason finalized it. Bentley was not a deist, but Christian naturalism was ontologically no different than deism. So he was lumped in with Paine as a threat to Christianity by supernaturalists who themselves had decided to put aside their soteriological differences and unite against the philosophical threat. The second half of the decade brought more radicalism yet, most notably the writings of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, just when Federalist fears and their resultant sedition laws aimed more suspicion yet at men like William Bentley. By 1800, a defensive Bentley's transformation from classical liberal to republican was complete.
Sarah Moss
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719076510
- eISBN:
- 9781781702710
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719076510.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Women's Literature
The study of food in literature complicates established critical positions. Both a libidinal pleasure and the ultimate commodity, food in fiction can represent sex as well as money, and brings the ...
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The study of food in literature complicates established critical positions. Both a libidinal pleasure and the ultimate commodity, food in fiction can represent sex as well as money, and brings the body and the marketplace together in ways that are sometimes obvious and sometimes unsettling. This book explores these relations in the context of late eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century women's fiction, where concerns about bodily, economic and intellectual productivity and consumption power decades of novels, conduct books and popular medicine. The introduction suggests ways in which attention to food in these texts might complicate recent developments in literary theory and criticism, while the body of the book is devoted to close readings of novels and children's stories by Frances Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth and Susan Ferrier. Burney and Wollstonecraft explore the ways in which eating and not eating (mis)represent women's sexuality, and consider how women's intellectual and economic productivity might disrupt easy equations between appetites at the table and in bed. Edgeworth and Ferrier, Anglo-Irish and Scottish writers respectively, are more interested in cooking and eating as ways of enacting and manipulating national identity and class.Less
The study of food in literature complicates established critical positions. Both a libidinal pleasure and the ultimate commodity, food in fiction can represent sex as well as money, and brings the body and the marketplace together in ways that are sometimes obvious and sometimes unsettling. This book explores these relations in the context of late eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century women's fiction, where concerns about bodily, economic and intellectual productivity and consumption power decades of novels, conduct books and popular medicine. The introduction suggests ways in which attention to food in these texts might complicate recent developments in literary theory and criticism, while the body of the book is devoted to close readings of novels and children's stories by Frances Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth and Susan Ferrier. Burney and Wollstonecraft explore the ways in which eating and not eating (mis)represent women's sexuality, and consider how women's intellectual and economic productivity might disrupt easy equations between appetites at the table and in bed. Edgeworth and Ferrier, Anglo-Irish and Scottish writers respectively, are more interested in cooking and eating as ways of enacting and manipulating national identity and class.
Jennie Batchelor
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719082573
- eISBN:
- 9781781701829
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719082573.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
This book challenges influential accounts about gender and the novel by revealing the complex ways in which labour informed the lives and writing of a number of middling and genteel women authors ...
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This book challenges influential accounts about gender and the novel by revealing the complex ways in which labour informed the lives and writing of a number of middling and genteel women authors publishing between 1750 and 1830. It provides a seam of texts for exploring the vexed relationship between gender, work and writing. The four chapters that follow contain contextualised case studies of the treatment of manual, intellectual and domestic labour in the work and careers of Sarah Scott, Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft and women applicants to the writers' charity, the Literary Fund. By making women's work visible in our studies of female-authored fiction of the period, the book reveals the crucial role that these women played in articulating debates about the gendered division of labour, the (in)compatibility of women's domestic and professional lives, and the status and true value of women's work, which shaped eighteenth-century culture as surely as they do our own.Less
This book challenges influential accounts about gender and the novel by revealing the complex ways in which labour informed the lives and writing of a number of middling and genteel women authors publishing between 1750 and 1830. It provides a seam of texts for exploring the vexed relationship between gender, work and writing. The four chapters that follow contain contextualised case studies of the treatment of manual, intellectual and domestic labour in the work and careers of Sarah Scott, Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft and women applicants to the writers' charity, the Literary Fund. By making women's work visible in our studies of female-authored fiction of the period, the book reveals the crucial role that these women played in articulating debates about the gendered division of labour, the (in)compatibility of women's domestic and professional lives, and the status and true value of women's work, which shaped eighteenth-century culture as surely as they do our own.
Anne Stott
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199274888
- eISBN:
- 9780191714962
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199274888.003.0010
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History
Hannah More's increasingly ambitious plans for her Sunday schools led her to found another in the parish of Wedmore, where she encountered serious opposition from high church clergy. In 1799 she ...
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Hannah More's increasingly ambitious plans for her Sunday schools led her to found another in the parish of Wedmore, where she encountered serious opposition from high church clergy. In 1799 she published her most ambitious conduct-book, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, which has been seen as an anti-feminist polemic, but has also been compared to Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman. But it was the religious passages that most attracted attention and led to accusations of Calvinism from the ultra-Tory Anti-Jacobin Review and the high church clerics, Charles Daubeny and Jonathan Boucher.Less
Hannah More's increasingly ambitious plans for her Sunday schools led her to found another in the parish of Wedmore, where she encountered serious opposition from high church clergy. In 1799 she published her most ambitious conduct-book, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, which has been seen as an anti-feminist polemic, but has also been compared to Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman. But it was the religious passages that most attracted attention and led to accusations of Calvinism from the ultra-Tory Anti-Jacobin Review and the high church clerics, Charles Daubeny and Jonathan Boucher.
James Treadwell
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199262977
- eISBN:
- 9780191718724
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199262977.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
This chapter looks at occasions in a variety of Romantic-period texts when they consider themselves as autobiographies, or address the moment when self-writing becomes public. There is a particular ...
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This chapter looks at occasions in a variety of Romantic-period texts when they consider themselves as autobiographies, or address the moment when self-writing becomes public. There is a particular interest in apologetic or defensive positions; at such moments, autobiographical writing reflects the uncertain status of the genre in the literary public sphere. Instances are read in works by Carlyle, Wordsworth, Wollstonecraft, Catherine Cary, Percival Stockdale, Thomas Scott, and others. The chapter ends by suggesting that autobiographical acts in the period are best understood as transactions; all self-writing is engaged in negotiating the conditions under which it is published and read.Less
This chapter looks at occasions in a variety of Romantic-period texts when they consider themselves as autobiographies, or address the moment when self-writing becomes public. There is a particular interest in apologetic or defensive positions; at such moments, autobiographical writing reflects the uncertain status of the genre in the literary public sphere. Instances are read in works by Carlyle, Wordsworth, Wollstonecraft, Catherine Cary, Percival Stockdale, Thomas Scott, and others. The chapter ends by suggesting that autobiographical acts in the period are best understood as transactions; all self-writing is engaged in negotiating the conditions under which it is published and read.
James G. Basker
- Published in print:
- 1996
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198182887
- eISBN:
- 9780191673900
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198182887.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Women's Literature, 18th-century Literature
This chapter explores the unexpected but profoundly important presence of Samuel Johnson in the mind and writings of Mary Wollstonecraft. It has two aims: first, to map the intertextual connections ...
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This chapter explores the unexpected but profoundly important presence of Samuel Johnson in the mind and writings of Mary Wollstonecraft. It has two aims: first, to map the intertextual connections between them and thus show the extent to which Johnson informs Wollstonecraft’s mind and work; and, second, to examine three areas in which their affinity seems most remarkable — Wollstonecraft’s deliberate affiliation with Johnson as critical authority; as commentator on the condition of women; and, in her own life, as kindred spirit and consoling presence during moments of personal crisis and depression.Less
This chapter explores the unexpected but profoundly important presence of Samuel Johnson in the mind and writings of Mary Wollstonecraft. It has two aims: first, to map the intertextual connections between them and thus show the extent to which Johnson informs Wollstonecraft’s mind and work; and, second, to examine three areas in which their affinity seems most remarkable — Wollstonecraft’s deliberate affiliation with Johnson as critical authority; as commentator on the condition of women; and, in her own life, as kindred spirit and consoling presence during moments of personal crisis and depression.
Gary Kelly
- Published in print:
- 1993
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198122722
- eISBN:
- 9780191671524
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198122722.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
The French Revolution stirred a bitter debate in Britain about the nature of civil society and the political nation. This is a study of contemporary women writers' efforts to base a reformed state ...
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The French Revolution stirred a bitter debate in Britain about the nature of civil society and the political nation. This is a study of contemporary women writers' efforts to base a reformed state and national culture on virtues and domains traditionally conceded to women. The pre-Revolutionary call for the feminization of culture acquired new and controversial meaning during the Revolution debate with the claims of Mary Wollstonecraft and others for intellectual, vocational, sexual, and even political equality with men. But women writers of the period were faced with a literary discourse that assigned learned, sublime, and controversial genres and public and political themes to men. Women writers therefore undertook bold literary experiments which were derided and suppressed in their time, and which are still misunderstood. The chapter investigates this hitherto neglected achievement by combining a wide survey of women's writing in its historical context with detailed analyses of three leading women writers: Helen Maria Williams, Britain's most widely-read eyewitness to the Revolution; the determined feminist and self-styled ‘female philosopher’ Mary Hays; and Elizabeth Hamilton, relentless ‘feminizer’ of supposedly ‘masculine’ discourse, from satire to social reform, classics to theology.Less
The French Revolution stirred a bitter debate in Britain about the nature of civil society and the political nation. This is a study of contemporary women writers' efforts to base a reformed state and national culture on virtues and domains traditionally conceded to women. The pre-Revolutionary call for the feminization of culture acquired new and controversial meaning during the Revolution debate with the claims of Mary Wollstonecraft and others for intellectual, vocational, sexual, and even political equality with men. But women writers of the period were faced with a literary discourse that assigned learned, sublime, and controversial genres and public and political themes to men. Women writers therefore undertook bold literary experiments which were derided and suppressed in their time, and which are still misunderstood. The chapter investigates this hitherto neglected achievement by combining a wide survey of women's writing in its historical context with detailed analyses of three leading women writers: Helen Maria Williams, Britain's most widely-read eyewitness to the Revolution; the determined feminist and self-styled ‘female philosopher’ Mary Hays; and Elizabeth Hamilton, relentless ‘feminizer’ of supposedly ‘masculine’ discourse, from satire to social reform, classics to theology.
Barbara K. Seeber
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780262028059
- eISBN:
- 9780262325264
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262028059.003.0010
- Subject:
- Environmental Science, Environmental Studies
Barbara K. Seeber argues that Mary Wollstonecraft, a pioneering feminist theorist, also offers considerable insights into the relationship between human beings and nature. Wollstonecraft sees ...
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Barbara K. Seeber argues that Mary Wollstonecraft, a pioneering feminist theorist, also offers considerable insights into the relationship between human beings and nature. Wollstonecraft sees commonalities between human beings and other animals; she attributes sentience and emotion to animals and accords them ethical consideration. Anticipating ecofeminism, Wollstonecraft sees cruelty toward animals as part of a broader matrix of gender, class, and species oppression; tyrannical behavior toward animals and toward other human beings is mutually reinforcing. However, Wollstonecraft’s perspective on nature goes beyond moral consideration for animals: her written observations of the Scandinavian landscape assess the environmental degradation wrought by human beings and also break down the distinction between subject and object, as she immerses herself in an interactive, reciprocal relationship with the natural environment and also sees agency in the landscape’s nonhuman inhabitants. Incontesting the subject/object distinction, Wollstonecraft also criticizes, as patriarchal and oppressive, the ideal of the detached observer of nature.Less
Barbara K. Seeber argues that Mary Wollstonecraft, a pioneering feminist theorist, also offers considerable insights into the relationship between human beings and nature. Wollstonecraft sees commonalities between human beings and other animals; she attributes sentience and emotion to animals and accords them ethical consideration. Anticipating ecofeminism, Wollstonecraft sees cruelty toward animals as part of a broader matrix of gender, class, and species oppression; tyrannical behavior toward animals and toward other human beings is mutually reinforcing. However, Wollstonecraft’s perspective on nature goes beyond moral consideration for animals: her written observations of the Scandinavian landscape assess the environmental degradation wrought by human beings and also break down the distinction between subject and object, as she immerses herself in an interactive, reciprocal relationship with the natural environment and also sees agency in the landscape’s nonhuman inhabitants. Incontesting the subject/object distinction, Wollstonecraft also criticizes, as patriarchal and oppressive, the ideal of the detached observer of nature.
Nicola J. Watson
- Published in print:
- 1994
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198112976
- eISBN:
- 9780191670893
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198112976.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Whatever happened to the epistolary novel? Why was it that by 1825 the principal narrative form of 18th-century fiction had been replaced by the third-person and often historicised models which have ...
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Whatever happened to the epistolary novel? Why was it that by 1825 the principal narrative form of 18th-century fiction had been replaced by the third-person and often historicised models which have predominated ever since? This original and wide-ranging study charts the suppression of epistolary fiction, exploring the attempted radicalization of the genre by Wollstonecraft and other feminists in the 1790s, its rejection and parody by Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth, the increasingly discredited role played by letters in the historical novels of Jane Porter and Walter Scott, and their troubling, ghostly presence in the Gothic narratives of James Hogg and Charles Maturin. The shift in narrative method is seen as a response to anxieties about the French Revolution, with the epistolary, feminized, and sentimental plot replaced by a more authoritarian third-person mode as part of a wider redrawing of the relation between the individual and the social consensus.Less
Whatever happened to the epistolary novel? Why was it that by 1825 the principal narrative form of 18th-century fiction had been replaced by the third-person and often historicised models which have predominated ever since? This original and wide-ranging study charts the suppression of epistolary fiction, exploring the attempted radicalization of the genre by Wollstonecraft and other feminists in the 1790s, its rejection and parody by Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth, the increasingly discredited role played by letters in the historical novels of Jane Porter and Walter Scott, and their troubling, ghostly presence in the Gothic narratives of James Hogg and Charles Maturin. The shift in narrative method is seen as a response to anxieties about the French Revolution, with the epistolary, feminized, and sentimental plot replaced by a more authoritarian third-person mode as part of a wider redrawing of the relation between the individual and the social consensus.
Gary Kelly
- Published in print:
- 1993
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198122722
- eISBN:
- 9780191671524
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198122722.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Mary Hays continued writing feminist critique after 1800, though like other women writers she diverted this into forms acceptable to the post-Revolutionary move beyond the confrontations of the ...
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Mary Hays continued writing feminist critique after 1800, though like other women writers she diverted this into forms acceptable to the post-Revolutionary move beyond the confrontations of the earlier 1790s. Her major project was the feminist biographical history of women that she had called for in 1796 and announced in the Monthly Magazine for 1798 as forthcoming. Hays' biography continues her feminist discourse of the Revolution debate in several ways. It applies her version of Enlightenment materialism to account for Wollstonecraft's character and fate as illustrations of the general condition of women. It attributes Wollstonecraft's strong passions to her domestic and social experience and her desultory education, and sees them as the source of her feminist protest and the cause of both the admiration and condemnation she and her works inspired.Less
Mary Hays continued writing feminist critique after 1800, though like other women writers she diverted this into forms acceptable to the post-Revolutionary move beyond the confrontations of the earlier 1790s. Her major project was the feminist biographical history of women that she had called for in 1796 and announced in the Monthly Magazine for 1798 as forthcoming. Hays' biography continues her feminist discourse of the Revolution debate in several ways. It applies her version of Enlightenment materialism to account for Wollstonecraft's character and fate as illustrations of the general condition of women. It attributes Wollstonecraft's strong passions to her domestic and social experience and her desultory education, and sees them as the source of her feminist protest and the cause of both the admiration and condemnation she and her works inspired.
Nicola J. Watson
- Published in print:
- 1994
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198112976
- eISBN:
- 9780191670893
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198112976.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter begins with a survey of the interwoven fates of the letter and the sexually transgressive heroine in radical polemic and fiction from 1790 to 1800, examining the strategies by which ...
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This chapter begins with a survey of the interwoven fates of the letter and the sexually transgressive heroine in radical polemic and fiction from 1790 to 1800, examining the strategies by which radical novelists, including Helen Maria Williams, Eliza Fenwick, Mary Hays, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Charlotte Smith, attempted to appropriate and modify the plot of sensibility provided by La Nouvelle Héloïse to ratify the heroine's self-legitimating revolutionary desire as expressed in letters.Less
This chapter begins with a survey of the interwoven fates of the letter and the sexually transgressive heroine in radical polemic and fiction from 1790 to 1800, examining the strategies by which radical novelists, including Helen Maria Williams, Eliza Fenwick, Mary Hays, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Charlotte Smith, attempted to appropriate and modify the plot of sensibility provided by La Nouvelle Héloïse to ratify the heroine's self-legitimating revolutionary desire as expressed in letters.
Helen Small
- Published in print:
- 1998
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198184911
- eISBN:
- 9780191674396
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198184911.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter comments on the case of Sarah Fletcher and Mary Wollstonecraft. As this chapter aims to show, stories about women driven mad by the death or infidelity of their lovers were so thoroughly ...
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This chapter comments on the case of Sarah Fletcher and Mary Wollstonecraft. As this chapter aims to show, stories about women driven mad by the death or infidelity of their lovers were so thoroughly conventional that they obliged writers to confront their literariness and to make particular efforts at originality. In that respect, the love-mad woman brings not an excess of meaning but a reduction of meaning. Almost all the writers who pick up this convention in the nineteenth century do so with a degree of distance. Love-mad women inspired a great deal of tawdry writing, but they also spurred many novelists into remarkable innovation. For medical writers in search of a more effective mode of treating the insane, they were beginning to seem rather less tractable.Less
This chapter comments on the case of Sarah Fletcher and Mary Wollstonecraft. As this chapter aims to show, stories about women driven mad by the death or infidelity of their lovers were so thoroughly conventional that they obliged writers to confront their literariness and to make particular efforts at originality. In that respect, the love-mad woman brings not an excess of meaning but a reduction of meaning. Almost all the writers who pick up this convention in the nineteenth century do so with a degree of distance. Love-mad women inspired a great deal of tawdry writing, but they also spurred many novelists into remarkable innovation. For medical writers in search of a more effective mode of treating the insane, they were beginning to seem rather less tractable.
Jon Mee
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199591749
- eISBN:
- 9780191731433
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199591749.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
This chapter focuses on the particular conversable world created by London’s radical intelligensia in the 1790s. It explores the idea of ‘rational conversation’ propounded by Godwin, Hays, and ...
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This chapter focuses on the particular conversable world created by London’s radical intelligensia in the 1790s. It explores the idea of ‘rational conversation’ propounded by Godwin, Hays, and Wollstonecraft and locates them in relation to their social worlds. It places Godwin’s idea of ‘the collision of mind with mind’ in relationship to the more raucous forms of sociability sometimes found in popular radical associations, and examines his dispute with John Thelwall over whether such associations could sustain rational conversation. Partly as a reaction, it argues, Godwin developed a more polite and affective notion of discourse in his Enquirer essays. This development is in turn related to Wollstonecraft’s Letters from Sweden, Norway, and Denmark and the idea of ‘sentient language’ explored in Hays’s novel Memoirs of Emma Courtney. If transcending conversation as a scene of conflicting social mediations seemed attractive to these writers, the chapter suggests a melancholy sense of exclusion can also be found in their writing after 1795, not least because of governmental encroachment on freedom of conversation and the dissolution of the republic of letters that had helped form their idea of the literary.Less
This chapter focuses on the particular conversable world created by London’s radical intelligensia in the 1790s. It explores the idea of ‘rational conversation’ propounded by Godwin, Hays, and Wollstonecraft and locates them in relation to their social worlds. It places Godwin’s idea of ‘the collision of mind with mind’ in relationship to the more raucous forms of sociability sometimes found in popular radical associations, and examines his dispute with John Thelwall over whether such associations could sustain rational conversation. Partly as a reaction, it argues, Godwin developed a more polite and affective notion of discourse in his Enquirer essays. This development is in turn related to Wollstonecraft’s Letters from Sweden, Norway, and Denmark and the idea of ‘sentient language’ explored in Hays’s novel Memoirs of Emma Courtney. If transcending conversation as a scene of conflicting social mediations seemed attractive to these writers, the chapter suggests a melancholy sense of exclusion can also be found in their writing after 1795, not least because of governmental encroachment on freedom of conversation and the dissolution of the republic of letters that had helped form their idea of the literary.
John Leonard
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199666553
- eISBN:
- 9780191748967
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199666553.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature
Milton has been both deplored as a misogynist and acclaimed as the pre-eminent poet of companionate marriage. This chapter traces the emergence and development of both of these views, as well as ...
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Milton has been both deplored as a misogynist and acclaimed as the pre-eminent poet of companionate marriage. This chapter traces the emergence and development of both of these views, as well as critical responses to prelapsarian lovemaking. Many critics have discussed Milton’s eroticism separately from his sexual politics, but it is a curious fact that the poem’s most bitter or offensive passages are juxtaposed with its most tender professions of love. This chapter asks why this should be so, and argues that critics on both sides of the ‘misogyny’ question have obscured the real issue by either emphasizing or denying Milton’s supposed ‘grudge’ against women. Mary Wollstonecraft offered a more searching criticism when she argued that it is Milton’s love, not hatred, that poses the real threat. The chapter also asks what Milton meant by ‘cheerful conversation’ (in Paradise and the divorce pamphlets), and examines the history of critical responses to angelic lovemaking.Less
Milton has been both deplored as a misogynist and acclaimed as the pre-eminent poet of companionate marriage. This chapter traces the emergence and development of both of these views, as well as critical responses to prelapsarian lovemaking. Many critics have discussed Milton’s eroticism separately from his sexual politics, but it is a curious fact that the poem’s most bitter or offensive passages are juxtaposed with its most tender professions of love. This chapter asks why this should be so, and argues that critics on both sides of the ‘misogyny’ question have obscured the real issue by either emphasizing or denying Milton’s supposed ‘grudge’ against women. Mary Wollstonecraft offered a more searching criticism when she argued that it is Milton’s love, not hatred, that poses the real threat. The chapter also asks what Milton meant by ‘cheerful conversation’ (in Paradise and the divorce pamphlets), and examines the history of critical responses to angelic lovemaking.
Norma Thompson
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- October 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780300088175
- eISBN:
- 9780300128055
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300088175.003.0004
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory
Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Shelley are a cohort of writers on the modern state who are practiced in the artful extreme and in the school of Machiavelli. However, modern readers are ...
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Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Shelley are a cohort of writers on the modern state who are practiced in the artful extreme and in the school of Machiavelli. However, modern readers are slow to connect them despite the closeness of their enterprises. This chapter reconsiders the alliances of modern rhetoric to illustrate the richness of this shared mode. It argues that when Burke sought to restore a dignity to a feminine perspective; when Wollstonecraft sought to extend the application of the masculine perspective; and when Shelley pursued their intertwined fates, each was picking up on a Machiavellian lead, to seek for change in a vocabulary of untried possibilities.Less
Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Shelley are a cohort of writers on the modern state who are practiced in the artful extreme and in the school of Machiavelli. However, modern readers are slow to connect them despite the closeness of their enterprises. This chapter reconsiders the alliances of modern rhetoric to illustrate the richness of this shared mode. It argues that when Burke sought to restore a dignity to a feminine perspective; when Wollstonecraft sought to extend the application of the masculine perspective; and when Shelley pursued their intertwined fates, each was picking up on a Machiavellian lead, to seek for change in a vocabulary of untried possibilities.
Carol Watts
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748625642
- eISBN:
- 9780748671717
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748625642.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
This chapter reviews the wandering of Laurence Sterne's potent figure of ‘poor Maria’, as a sign of the disciplinary production of ‘women's time’ and the violence of primitive accumulation. Maria ...
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This chapter reviews the wandering of Laurence Sterne's potent figure of ‘poor Maria’, as a sign of the disciplinary production of ‘women's time’ and the violence of primitive accumulation. Maria appears to owe even more to the narrative of the sentimental magdalen. The magdalen was a significant figure of institutionalised concern, the object of a mid-century notion of national security. The aim of magdalen narrative is to chart the loss and redemption of a woman's virtue. Mary Collier's ‘A Woman's Labour’ can be read as dramatising a struggle with the imposition of women's time, revealing aspects of its secret history. This poem memorialises a point of struggle, in the terms not of singular suffering but of a collectivity — the daughters of Danaus — who turn the violence back on the culture from whence it came. There is a utopian dimension to Mary Wollstonecraft's critique of the brutalities of women's time.Less
This chapter reviews the wandering of Laurence Sterne's potent figure of ‘poor Maria’, as a sign of the disciplinary production of ‘women's time’ and the violence of primitive accumulation. Maria appears to owe even more to the narrative of the sentimental magdalen. The magdalen was a significant figure of institutionalised concern, the object of a mid-century notion of national security. The aim of magdalen narrative is to chart the loss and redemption of a woman's virtue. Mary Collier's ‘A Woman's Labour’ can be read as dramatising a struggle with the imposition of women's time, revealing aspects of its secret history. This poem memorialises a point of struggle, in the terms not of singular suffering but of a collectivity — the daughters of Danaus — who turn the violence back on the culture from whence it came. There is a utopian dimension to Mary Wollstonecraft's critique of the brutalities of women's time.
Jennie Batchelor
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719082573
- eISBN:
- 9781781701829
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719082573.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
This chapter addresses the complex turns that the debate on women's work took in the specific context of the 1790s and, more specifically still, in the non-fictional and imaginative publications of ...
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This chapter addresses the complex turns that the debate on women's work took in the specific context of the 1790s and, more specifically still, in the non-fictional and imaginative publications of one of the most vocal and eloquent commentators on this issue, Mary Wollstonecraft. Her extensive, but by no means internally consistent, reflections upon the labour and literary marketplaces signal crucial, and in many ways decisive, developments in the narratives about work and authorship that this book examines. Most particularly, an investigation of her polemical writings, philosophical works, travel literature and novels suggests that the more labour was prized in late eighteenth-century writings on political economy, and the more centrally its language figured in the republic of letters' self-presentation at the century's close, the more vital and the more difficult it became for women writers to press the discourse of labour into the service of their gender and textual politics.Less
This chapter addresses the complex turns that the debate on women's work took in the specific context of the 1790s and, more specifically still, in the non-fictional and imaginative publications of one of the most vocal and eloquent commentators on this issue, Mary Wollstonecraft. Her extensive, but by no means internally consistent, reflections upon the labour and literary marketplaces signal crucial, and in many ways decisive, developments in the narratives about work and authorship that this book examines. Most particularly, an investigation of her polemical writings, philosophical works, travel literature and novels suggests that the more labour was prized in late eighteenth-century writings on political economy, and the more centrally its language figured in the republic of letters' self-presentation at the century's close, the more vital and the more difficult it became for women writers to press the discourse of labour into the service of their gender and textual politics.
Sarah Moss
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719076510
- eISBN:
- 9781781702710
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719076510.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Women's Literature
This chapter examines the materiality of reproductive labour in the works of Mary Wollstonecraft. It shows the changing dynamics in motherhood, which ceased to be solely defined by the physiological ...
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This chapter examines the materiality of reproductive labour in the works of Mary Wollstonecraft. It shows the changing dynamics in motherhood, which ceased to be solely defined by the physiological processes of child-bearing and became an emotional and social responsibility. The chapter then introduces the model of ‘commodity production versus nature’, and also focuses on writing and reproduction, as well as the ways discourses of writing and reproduction are phrased in terms of nutrition.Less
This chapter examines the materiality of reproductive labour in the works of Mary Wollstonecraft. It shows the changing dynamics in motherhood, which ceased to be solely defined by the physiological processes of child-bearing and became an emotional and social responsibility. The chapter then introduces the model of ‘commodity production versus nature’, and also focuses on writing and reproduction, as well as the ways discourses of writing and reproduction are phrased in terms of nutrition.
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804758406
- eISBN:
- 9780804779685
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804758406.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
This chapter examines how the figure of the female melancholic, as she appears in Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Mary ...
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This chapter examines how the figure of the female melancholic, as she appears in Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Mary Shelley's Matilda, and Jane Austen's Persuasion, dramatizes multiple concerns about the problems of skepticism in relation to selfhood, agency, and knowledge. For Wollstonecraft, Shelley, and Austen, the female melancholic is perceived as ambivalently participating in and challenging what Wollstonecraft will call “making an appearance in the world,” or the project of developing the social terms under which one makes oneself known and available to others. It is argued that the female melancholic rethinks this incentive to declare oneself, to make oneself known as a properly civic subject, and finds in loss a state of being which lends itself to an ethics of dispossession, one that fundamentally disarticulates personal fulfillment from self-presentation and self-assertion.Less
This chapter examines how the figure of the female melancholic, as she appears in Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Mary Shelley's Matilda, and Jane Austen's Persuasion, dramatizes multiple concerns about the problems of skepticism in relation to selfhood, agency, and knowledge. For Wollstonecraft, Shelley, and Austen, the female melancholic is perceived as ambivalently participating in and challenging what Wollstonecraft will call “making an appearance in the world,” or the project of developing the social terms under which one makes oneself known and available to others. It is argued that the female melancholic rethinks this incentive to declare oneself, to make oneself known as a properly civic subject, and finds in loss a state of being which lends itself to an ethics of dispossession, one that fundamentally disarticulates personal fulfillment from self-presentation and self-assertion.
Sandrine Bergès and Alan M. S. J. Coffee (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- December 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198766841
- eISBN:
- 9780191821127
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198766841.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, History of Philosophy, Political Philosophy
Interest in the contribution made by women to the history of philosophy is burgeoning and intense research is underway to recover their works, many of which have been lost or overlooked. At the ...
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Interest in the contribution made by women to the history of philosophy is burgeoning and intense research is underway to recover their works, many of which have been lost or overlooked. At the forefront of this revival is interest in the works of Mary Wollstonecraft. While she has long been studied by feminists and later discovered by political scientists, philosophers have only recently begun to recognize the value of her work for their discipline. This volume brings together current leading scholarship that introduces readers to Wollstonecraft’s range as a moral and political philosopher of note, taking both a historical perspective and applying her thinking to current academic debates. Subjects include Wollstonecraft’s ideas on love and respect, friendship and marriage, motherhood, property in the person, and virtue and the emotions, as well as the application her thought has for current thinking on relational autonomy, and animal and children’s rights. A major theme of the book places her within the republican tradition of political theory and analyses the contribution she makes to its conceptual resources.Less
Interest in the contribution made by women to the history of philosophy is burgeoning and intense research is underway to recover their works, many of which have been lost or overlooked. At the forefront of this revival is interest in the works of Mary Wollstonecraft. While she has long been studied by feminists and later discovered by political scientists, philosophers have only recently begun to recognize the value of her work for their discipline. This volume brings together current leading scholarship that introduces readers to Wollstonecraft’s range as a moral and political philosopher of note, taking both a historical perspective and applying her thinking to current academic debates. Subjects include Wollstonecraft’s ideas on love and respect, friendship and marriage, motherhood, property in the person, and virtue and the emotions, as well as the application her thought has for current thinking on relational autonomy, and animal and children’s rights. A major theme of the book places her within the republican tradition of political theory and analyses the contribution she makes to its conceptual resources.
