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No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Frances Burney was the only major long eighteenth-century novelist to bring shopkeepers and tradesmen into literary focus. The current study seeks to shed light on this neglected aspect of the author’s work. By combining textual analysis with historicist, and, to a lesser extent, biographical criticism, it examines the author’s four novels alongside a cultural and literary trend that emerges in late eighteenth-century England and is defined by an increased fascination for, and hostility against, economically prospering retailers and smaller tradesmen. Through her fiction, Burney developed new strategies to represent the domestic trader as an unwelcome new upstart, and, it is argued, contributed to the popular conceptualisation of a social stratum that we nowadays call the lower middle class. Her novels should not be labelled reactionary. Even though they are implicated in traditional processes of stratification, they promote a progressive social vision in which the existence of the domestic trader is recognised rather than negated. More generally, this study argues that the concept of the lower middle class can be an enriching hermeneutic tool for scholars of eighteenth-century studies. By using the lower middle class as a conceptual framework within which to investigate not only Burney’s novels but a whole body of writings on the subject of the upwardly mobile trader, it shows, firstly, that the historian can draw on eighteenth-century literature to capture a sense of how certain models of class come into being and, secondly, that the literary critic can effectively use the category of social class to make new discoveries, not only about eighteenth-century literature but also about Burney’s unique contribution to the development of the novel genre.

This thesis is a comprehensive, chronological and synoptic study of political thought in the eleven novels of Charlotte Smith (1749-1806), published between 1788 and 1802. It traces the ways in which Smith incorporates topics which were the subject of political debate in the period immediately following the outbreak of the French Revolution into the framework of the courtship novel, and demonstrates her engagement with what was being said and written by polemicists in response to events in both France and England. By examining each of Smith's novels in relation to a wide range of contemporary political writing, I show that she participated more continuously and closely in the political discourse of the 1790s than has been realised or documented. I also argue that her involvement with political discourse was an important factor in her development as an innovative and experimental novelist. As she questioned and challenged accepted political certainties, and was influenced by politically radical ideas, so her novels became increasingly experimental in form. Even in her pre-Revolutionary novels, Smith expressed dissatisfaction with the socio-political values endorsed by the conventions of courtship novels which commonly resolved with the heroine placed within a patriarchal family, married to a man of rank and living in an inherited landed property. The political battles of the 1790s were fought using topoi of patriarchal authority and patrilineal inheritance, which were seen by conservatives as vital to the preservation of the security and prosperity of the country. At a symbolic level these topoi mirrored the relationship between monarch and subject and the longevity and stability of constitution and state. Smith's political alignment with radical reformers meant that the safe resolutions of her earlier novels were modified or jettisoned as her courtship narratives were inflected by this discourse and became the forums for political debate.

The thesis is an examination of Mary Hays's first and second novels, The Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) and The Victim of Prejudice (1799) in order to claim a reworking of political and gender constructions of women that underwrite rape narratives produced in the Long Eighteenth Century. To discuss ways in which Hays's novels challenge the assumptions and constructions of femininity disseminated in earlier rape texts I have selected examples of polemic and narratives written between the 1670s and the 1790s together with some of the contemporary Radical texts which exhibit similar concerns and views expressed in the writer's feminist tracts and novels. I argue that Hays's gender politics are closely related to the issues played out in both novels. That is, The Memoirs of Emma Courtney is a protest against contemporary views of 'femininity' and a sustained and rational argument for female sexual desire rather than feminine 'depravity' or 'madness'. The Victim of Prejudice asserts that although society's reaction to rape ensures dire consequences for the violated women her sexuality is not necessarily responsible for her rape. Hence, the view of women advanced in Hays's first novel is crucial to an understanding of issues raised in the refashioning of the rape episode in the second.

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Frances Burney's early experiences of performance culture in her father Charles's musical household uniquely informed her own professional identity. The imagined continuity between the authorial body and its textual product parallels the physical exposure associated with performance professions, especially for women in a gender artistic culture. Burney's relationship with the literary hostess Hester Thrale illustrates the perpetuation of gendered models of cultural production and consumption in fashionable literary society. Burney's attempt to maintain an emotional, rather than intellectual, friendship with Thrale resists the cultural commodification that attends literary celebrity. The meritocratic, artistic-professional ethos of the Burney house offers an alternative to the producer-consumer paradigm of the fashionable drawing, room. Burney's correspondence with her sister Susan creates a microcosm of this ungendered, egalitarian creative household, and elevates the privacy of the domestic family as a creative space uninflected by specular relations. Burney's novels increasingly interrogate the eighteenth-century obsession with visibility; her Court Journals relate the infiltration by specular relations of even this most private of spaces, which is manifested in her later novels, particularly The Wanderer. While cultural participation and specialisation offers her heroines the potential for the development of an autonomous identity, the visibility of cultural artefacts invites appropriation of that identity by others. Furthermore, her novels demonstrate the increasing violence with which female authorial bodies are threatened through association with their public, textual product. Memoirs of Doctor Burney is the pinnacle of Burney's separation of private and professional identity. In rendering a public version of her father's life, Burney mobilises her professional persona in order to shield the familial, domestic privacy in which true creativity is possible. Bumey claims narrative authority that both invokes and supersedes her father's. This narration of her own creative origins is the ultimate metaphor for her confident literary autonomy.

In this thesis I assert that Robinson’s theatrical heritage positioned her uniquely to confront the revolutionary explosions of 1790s radical thought. In her writings, Robinson’s onstage experience of gender performativity is transformed into a bold feminist critique of gender roles for women (and men) everywhere. In Chapter 1, I study writings by eighteenth-century theatrical women to argue that Robinson’s feminism must be understood within a theatrical context to appreciate the unique radicalism of her feminist vision. In Chapter 2, I explore how Robinson’s powerful identification with Marie Antoinette lies at the roots of her feminist project. In Chapter 3, I explain how Robinson then turns to the voice of Sappho to develop a radical vision of transcendent genius. In Chapter 4, I demonstrate how Robinson turns her critique of gender on men through the performative space of the masquerade in Walsingham (1797). Finally, in Chapter 5, I explain how this radical feminist critique is moulded to utopian ends in The Natural Daughter (1799), as Robinson rewrites the ending of Wollstonecraft’s Wrongs of Woman in a vision of the revolutionary family. I read three strands into Robinson’s feminism: 1) the rejection of incommensurable sexual difference; 2) the union of rational virtue and benevolent sensibility in the development of transcendent genius; and 3) a radical critique of the anxious crisis in 1790s masculinity. The result of this was a utopian vision of the future quite different from Wollstonecraft’s better-known brand of ascetic feminism. Instead, Robinson’s feminist theory works to rescue the original values of the French Revolution from beneath the ravages of Jacobin corruption. Beyond the limiting categories of incommensurable sexual difference, Robinson envisions a family in which woman would no longer have to renounce her sexual body in order to engage with society, and man could finally accept her as his equal.