Abstract
Despite the apparent submergence and eclipse of feminist Critical realism by the sentimentalist heroine’s text after the first two decades of the eighteenth century, an anti-romance undercurrent continued to circulate in the English women’s literary tradition throughout the century. While women have long been popularly associated with the romance, both as writers and readers, the female anti-romance tradition that I trace in this chapter suggests that the anti-romance was at least as important in women’s literary culture as the romance.
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Notes
Charles C. Mish, Preface to Restoration Prose Fiction 1666–1700 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), p. x. These stories may well have been intended for a masculine audience since they were published in The Gentleman’s fournal, but it is Mish’s assumption that the anti-romance would not appeal to women that I wish to highlight.
Ian Watt, “Serious Reflections on The Rise of the Novel,” in Towards a Poetics of Fiction, ed. Mark Spilka (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), p. 103. Further references follow in the text.
Gilbert Highet, The Anatomy of Satire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1962), p. 235.
Northrup Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 172.
Maria de Zayas, The Enchantments of Love, trans H. Patsy Boyer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. xvii;
Maria de Zayas, Parte segunda del Sara y entretenimiento honesto [Desengaños amorosos], ed. Alicia Yllera (Madrid: Cátedra, 1983), p. 118.VuiVui
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), p. 46.
M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 24VuiVui. Further references follow in the text.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 239. Further references follow in the text.
Wayne C. Booth, “Freedom of Interpretation: Bakhtin and the Challenge of Feminist Criticism,” in Bakhtin, ed. Gary Saul Morson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 154. Further references follow in the text.
Erich Auerbach, Zur Technik der Frührenaissancenovelle in Italien und Frankreich, 2d ed (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1971), p. 26. My translation.
Christine de Pisan, Oeuvres poétiques, ed. Maurice Roy, 2 vols. (1891; New York: Johnson Reprint, 1965), 2:14VuiVui. My translation.
Paul Salzman, English Prose Fiction, 1558 – 1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), pp. 274–76.
Joan DeJean, Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 37–40.
Jean Regnault de Segrais, Les Nouvelles françaises, ed. Roger Guichemarre, vol. 1 (Paris: STFM, 1991), pp. 93–103VuiVui, for example. Further references follow in the text. My translations throughout.
[Margaret Cavendish], the Marchioness of Newcastle, CCXI Sociable Letters (1664; facsimile reprint, Menston, England: Scholar Press, 1969), pp. 39–0. Further references follow in the text.
Nancy K. Miller, The Heroine’s Text: Readings in the French and English Novel, 1722 – 1782 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), p. 4. Further references follow in the text.
Margaret Anne Doody, “George Eliot and the Eighteenth-Century Novel,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 35, no. 3 (1980): 268.
This the local-color realism of writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rose Terry Cooke, and Sarah Orne Jewett. See Josephine Donovan, New England Local Color Literature: A Women’s Tradition (New York: Ungar, 1983).
Sarah Fielding, The Adventures of David Simple (1744; reprint, London: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 101. Further references follow in the text.
Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote (1752; reprint, London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 23. Further references follow in the text.
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 149.
As cited in O. Elizabeth McWhorter Harden, Maria Edgeworth’s Art of Prose Fiction (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), p. 114.
Maria Edgeworth, The Absentee (1818; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 2. Further references follow in the text.
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© 1999 Josephine Donovan
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Donovan, J. (1999). Women against Romance. In: Women and the Rise of the Novel, 1405–1726. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-67512-8_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-67512-8_8
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