Property, education and identity in late eighteenth-century fiction : the heroines of disinterest / Virginia H. Cope.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cope, Virginia H.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

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

English fiction.

Heroines in literature.

Identity (Philosophical concept) in literature.

Social classes in literature.

Physical Description:

viii, 180 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan, [2009]

Summary:

Virginia H. Cope analyzes the transition to modern ideals of identity by tracking a character type, herein called the Heroine of Disinterest, that dominated late eighteenth-century British fiction. Best represented in Frances Burney's 1778 Evelina, the Heroine of Disinterest is a young woman of uncertain birth but unshakeable virtue, manifested in her acts of charity and absolute imperviousness to the lure of wealth and status. Although the selfless heroine and the inheritance plot in which she figures are often dismissed as conventional, this book demonstrates that the character was central to mediating the vexed relations among property, education, and identity, unsettled by the rise of a capitalist ethos. Associating disinterest with women rescued the ancient ideal from extinction while also providing the discursive means to divide subjectivity from proprietorship, opening the way for the Romantic ideal of selfhold as the product of experience and reflection rather than inherited wealth and lineage.

Contents:

1 Feminizing Disinterest 20

2 Burney's Heroines of Disinterest 39

3 Strategic Disavowals in A Simple Story 65

4 Gothic Properties 86

5 Property Recollected in Tranquility 116

Conclusion: Austenian Disinterest 139.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780230220232

0230220231

OCLC:

319209536