Conserving the radicals: A reformed reading of three women novelists of the 1790s.

摘要

Feminist critical assessments of British women novelists of the 1790s have, over the last twenty years, emphasized the traces of emergent radical political thought in their works, resulting in a bias which obscures the works' multivocality. This project aims to correct this bias by approaching novels from the 1790s by three women---Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Frances Burney---as embedded and participating in the workings of the dominant culture. Specifically, their works display the tension within their culture between the claims of emergent modern thought and the forms of traditional culture. The works this project considers will be viewed as sites of contest, in which the representation of the female subject is the locus for struggle between existing and emerging ideologies, and as acts of negotiation, engaged in the re-forming of cultural conditions rather than subversion of or rebellion against them.;This project's primary implication is intended to be the expansion of feminist interpretations of texts through engaging such interpretations with current ideas in the history of the novel and cultural history, recent feminist psychoanalytical theory, contemporary novel theory, and current work in ethical criticism and moral philosophy. The readings in each chapter are predicated upon understanding the novel as a constructor of culture and identity. With this understanding in mind, the project's central purpose is to show that women novelists of the late eighteenth century engaged in the construction of a female subject as an agent in her own right. By reading the novels of Wollstonecraft, Inchbald, and Burney through the theoretical matrices provided by the works of J. J. Rousseau, Edmund Burke, Julia Kristeva, Emmanuel Levinas, and Mikhail Bakhtin, this project will demonstrate the ways in which the body, as a locus of signification, contests the neo-Nietszchean psychology that current feminist theory normalizes. What this project offers is an alternative for feminist literary criticism which will free it from the constraints of the critical discourses which have been allowed to dominate it and which will open avenues for more constructive readings of women writers of the 1790s and beyond.