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This book analyzes the ways in which female virtue was tied to a new concept of authenticity in 18th-century sentimental fiction, producing a redefinition of gender relations on the one hand & a re-examination of the value & place of fictional narrative on the other. As the old values on the ...

This book analyzes the ways in which female virtue was tied to a new concept of authenticity in 18th-century sentimental fiction, producing a redefinition of gender relations on the one hand & a re-examination of the value & place of fictional narrative on the other. As the old values on the aristocracy were being overturned & it was no longer possible simply to equate personal worth with rank or title, a new narrative protagonist was born - someone who was authentic, virtuous, & usually female. New questions arose at the same time: What kind of language could represent this authentic self? How far should the virtuous subject be tested, & what is the role of the reader in the process? With in-depth analysis of four important 18th-century epistolary novels - Pamela, Clarissa, La Nouvelle Heloise, & Les Liaisons Dangereuses - the author shows that the female protagonist in these works is forced to protect her body & her writing from violation. She argues that a disturbing equation emerges between revealing the female body & revealing a female sensibility &, therefore, between pleasure - both narrative & visual - & virtue. Concluding with Les Liaisons Dangereuses & the end of the sentimental narrative tradition, the author questions even the possibility of sustaining authentic language. In these four texts, she says, writing becomes an ideological as well as literary tool for the establishment of new cultural values.

Proceeding from the perspective of Jurgen Habermas's public sphere theory, this book studies the popular eighteenth-century genre of the epistolary narrative through readings of four works: Montesquieu's Lettres persanes (1721), Richardson's Clarissa (1749-50), Riccoboni's Lettres de Mistriss Fanni ...

Proceeding from the perspective of Jurgen Habermas's public sphere theory, this book studies the popular eighteenth-century genre of the epistolary narrative through readings of four works: Montesquieu's Lettres persanes (1721), Richardson's Clarissa (1749-50), Riccoboni's Lettres de Mistriss Fanni Butlerd (1757), and Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer (1782). The author situates epistolary narratives in the contexts of eighteenth-century print culture: the rise of new models of readership and the newly influential role of the author; the model of contract derived from liberal political theory as it relates to new writer/reader relations; and the techniques and aesthetics of mechanical reproduction. Writing at the paradoxical crossroads of public and private, epistolary authors used the genre to formulate a range of responses to a cultural anxiety about private energies and appetites, particularly those of women, as well as to legitimate their own authorial practices. Just as the socialcontract increasingly came to be seen as the organizing instrument of public, civic relations in this period, the author argues that the epistolary novel serves analogously in the ostensible private sphere of affective relations to produce, socialize, and regulate the private subject as a citizen of the Republic of Letters.