Desire and Domestic Fiction: a Political History of the Novel

✍ Scribed by Armstrong, Nancy;

• Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
• Year: 1987;2006
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 329 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN: 0195364740

✦ Synopsis

Contents; Introduction: The Politics of Domesticating Culture, Then and Now; 1. The Rise of Female Authority in the Novel; 2. The Rise of the Domestic Woman; 3. The Rise of the Novel; 4. History in the House of Culture; 5. Seduction and the Scene of Reading; Epilogue; Notes; Index.;Desire and Domestic Fiction argues that far from being removed from historical events, novels by writers from Richardson to Woolf were themselves agents of the rise of the middle class. Drawing on texts that range from 18th-century female conduct books and contract theory to modernpsychoanalytic case histories and theories of reading, Armstrong shows that the emergence of a particular form of female subjectivity capable of reigning over the household paved the way for the establishment of institutions which today are accepted centers of political power. Neither passivesubjects nor embattled.