Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781611476255 |
---|---|
Publisher: | University Press Copublishing Division |
Publication date: | 06/22/2013 |
Pages: | 198 |
Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments Introduction I. The Literariness of History1 “My heart will stand the test”: Catharine Macaulay and Sympathetic History II. Traditional Genre and Naive Historical Narrative 2 Political Critique inSophia Lee’s The Recess and Ann Yearsley’s Earl Goodwin III. The “Collapse” of History and the Imaginary3 Helen Maria Williams and the “Regendering” of History4 Jane Porter's Novel Histories: "Romancing" the British Nation5 Mary Shelley's Foreclosed History in ValpergaIV. “Narrativity” and Feminist History6 “The worthy associates of the best efforts of the best men”: Lucy Aikin’sEpistles on Women and Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth Conclusion: Histories that are Novel Bibliography IndexWhat People are Saying About This
Lisa Kasmer's Novel Histories is an important book that will enrich our conversations about the relationships among literature, history, and politics in British women's writings. Looking with fresh eyes at texts from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Kasmer shows, in perceptive readings of works by Catharine Macaulay, Sophia Lee, Ann Yearsley, Helen Maria Williams, Jane Porter, Mary Shelley, and Lucy Aikin, how women writers innovated at a time when generic classifications were becoming just as restrictive as gender roles. Novel Histories provides a compelling argument for the necessity of returning to complicated past relationships between gender and genre, in order to create more politically nuanced literary histories today.
In a series of astute theoretical moves and close textual readings, Lisa Kasmer's Novel Histories powerfully analyzes the intersection of gender, genre and politics in the emergence of female-authored historical narratives in this period. As she shows, history writing became a discursive arena whose generic fluidity, encompassing fiction, biography, poetry, and drama, challenged both the existing codes of gender and of political discourse. Supported by persuasive discussions of works by Catherine Macaulay, Helen Maria Williams, William Godwin,Ann Yearsley, Mary Shelley and Lucy Aikin, Kasmer's argument for the all-importantimpact of gender on history writing by both women and mentakes us well beyond earlier work in this field. All scholars of literature, history and women's studiesin this period will need to know this book.
This book contributes immensely to our understanding of various forms of historical writing during the long eighteenth century. Kasmer’s impressive and extensive skills as a researcher are evident here, as she works with both canonical and less well-known texts, bringing them together in fresh and interesting ways. Kasmer argues that in women’s historical writing during this period we see a strong influence of ideas of sympathy, often with the connection between sympathy and the formation of political communities, between domestic ideals and political action. The analysis of Williams’ Letters from France, Shelley’s Valperga, and Aikin’s Epistles on Women reveals all of these writers as sophisticated thinkers, aware of the way that sympathy and sensibility might be manipulated for rhetorical effect and to achieve certain political aims.