This thesis argues that women's magazines in eighteenth-century England were not, as some recent scholarship has maintained, primarily instruments of gender construction. Rather, for the first seventy years of the century, periodicals directed at a mainly female readership represented a significant attempt to configure women's roles more actively within the emergent social order. Taking death as a subject, the thesis investigates the representation of death in the magazines, in order to show the ways in which they articulated and participated in the major discourses of the period, sometimes from a female perspective, and to show the ways in which the interests of women readers intersected with those of men in ways that were not always inflected by gender. The first part of the thesis is a summary account of print culture in the eighteenth century, especially with regard to the relationships between the new periodical press and the desire of eighteenth-century readers for improvement. Particular emphasis is given to this relationship in terms of women readers. The second, longer part of the thesis is an investigation into the representation of death in eighteenth-century women's magazines. This part relies extensively on primary material from the magazines and examines death in terms of changing attitudes and practices, in terms of the ways it was experienced in eighteenth-century life and reported in the magazines, and in terms of the suicide debate, a major eighteenth-century discourse that was intricately bound up with other issues of concern to the emergent middle classes.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/8689 |
| Date | January 1999 |
| Creators | Whiting, Patricia A. |
| Contributors | London, April, |
| Publisher | University of Ottawa (Canada) |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 270 p. |
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