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Seductive Forms: Women's Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740

Online ISBN:
9780191674341
Print ISBN:
9780198184775
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Seductive Forms: Women's Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740

Ros Ballaster
Ros Ballaster

Fellow in English Literature

Mansfield College, Oxford
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Published online:
3 October 2011
Published in print:
2 April 1998
Online ISBN:
9780191674341
Print ISBN:
9780198184775
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

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. This book explores the means by which the three leading Tory women novelists of the late 17th and early 18th 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). The book also explores the debts early prose fiction owed to French 17th-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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