The trauma of gender : a feminist theory of the English novel / Helene Moglen.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Moglen, Helene, 1936-2018.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English fiction--18th century--History and criticism.

English fiction.

Feminism and literature--Great Britain--History--18th century.

Feminism and literature.

English fiction--Male authors--History and criticism.

Sex role in literature.

Sex in literature.

Gender identity in literature.

Feminist literary criticism.

Women in literature.

English fiction--Male authors.

History.

Great Britain.

Physical Description:

x, 216 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Berkeley : University of California Press, [2001]

Summary:

Helene Moglen offers a revisionary feminist argument about the origins, cultural function, and formal structure of the English novel. While most critics and historians have associated the novel's emergence and development with the burgeoning of capitalism and the rise of the middle classes, Moglen contends that the novel principally came into being in order to manage the social and psychological strains of the modern sex-gender system. Rejecting the familiar claim that realism represents the novel's dominant tradition, she shows that, from its inception in the eighteenth century, the English novel has contained both realistic and fantastic narratives, which compete for primacy within individual texts.

Contents:

Introduction: The Gender Politics of Narrative Modes 1

1. Daniel Defoe and the Gendered Subject of Individualism 17

2. Clarissa and the Pornographic Imagination 57

3. (W)holes and Noses: The Indeterminacies of Tristram Shandy 87

4. Horace Walpole and the Nightmare of History 109

Conclusion: The Relation of Fiction and Theory 139.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 185-193) and index.

ISBN:

0520225880

0520225899

OCLC:

44650809