Skip to main content

Critical Irony, Standpoint Theory, and the Novel

  • Chapter
Women and the Rise of the Novel, 1405–1726
  • 36 Accesses

Abstract

Ironic perspectives develop when people sense a discontinuity between the official version of events and their own experience of them. When an unofficial, marginalized position becomes agreed on by numbers of people in a group, it gathers strength and provides some countervalence to the dominant perspective. Once members of a group identify their perspective as that of the group, the position approaches that of a political standpoint, a critical point of resistance to oppression.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

eBook
USD 16.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 16.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Notes

  1. Douglas Hay, as cited in Ellen Pollak, “Moll Flanders, Incest, and the Structure of Exchange,” Eighteenth Century 30, no. 1 (1989): 9.

    Google Scholar 

  2. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), p. 166. Further references follow in the text.

    Google Scholar 

  3. Catharine A. MacKinnon, “Sexuality, Pornography, and Method: ‘Pleasure under Patriarchy’,” in Feminism and Philosophy, ed. Nancy Tuana and Rose-marie Tong (Boulder: Westview, 1995), p. 135.

    Google Scholar 

  4. Karl Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 389.

    Google Scholar 

  5. Nancy C. M. Hartsock, “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism,” in Discovering Reality, ed. Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983), p. 303.

    Google Scholar 

  6. Josephine Donovan, “Women and the Rise of the Novel: A Feminist-Marxist Theory,” Signs 16, no. 3 (1991): 441–62. Portions of the remainder of this chapter were originally presented in a somewhat different form in this article. ©1991 by the University of Chicago.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Lucien Goldmann, Pour une sociologie du roman (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), pp. 21–57. Further references follow in the text. My translations throughout.

    Google Scholar 

  8. Alice Walker, “Everyday Use,” in Women and Fiction, ed. Susan Cahill (New York: New American Library, 1975), pp. 364–72.

    Google Scholar 

  9. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 30–31. Further references follow in the text.

    Google Scholar 

  10. Maurice Z. Shroder, “The Novel as a Genre” (1963), in The Novel: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Robert Murray Davis (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969), pp. 43–58.

    Google Scholar 

  11. John J. Richetti, Popular Fiction before Richardson, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 259. Further references follow in the text.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  12. Jane Barker, A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies; Or, Love and Virtue Recommended (1723; facsimile reprint, New York: Garland, 1973), p. 7. Further references follow in the text.

    Google Scholar 

  13. Ruth Perry, Women, Letters, and the Novel (New York: AMS Press, 1980), pp. 50, 52.

    Google Scholar 

  14. Judith Lowder Newton, Women, Power, and Subversion: Social Strategies in British Fiction, 1778 – 1860 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981), p. 10.

    Google Scholar 

  15. V. N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, 2d ed., trans. Ladislav Metejka and I. R. Titunik (New York and London: Seminar Press, 1973), pp. 141 n. 1,144.

    Google Scholar 

  16. Gary Saul Morson, “Tolstoy’s Absolute Language,” in Bakhtin: Essays and Dialogues on His Work, ed. Gary Saul Morson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 130.

    Google Scholar 

  17. Nancy K. Miller, The Heroine’s Text: Readings in the French and English Novel, 1722–1782 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).

    Google Scholar 

  18. Erich Auerbach, Zur Technik der Frührenaissancenovelle in Italien und Frankreich, 2d ed. (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1971), p. 31. My translation.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Authors

Copyright information

© 1999 Josephine Donovan

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Donovan, J. (1999). Critical Irony, Standpoint Theory, and the Novel. In: Women and the Rise of the Novel, 1405–1726. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-67512-8_2

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics