Inhibitions on Eighteenth-Century Women Novelists: Elizabeth Inchbald and Charlotte Smith

1977 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katharine M. Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Elizabeth Inchbald ◽  
Charlotte Smith ◽  
Women Novelists

Magazine Miniatures: Portraits of Actresses, Princesses, and Queens in Late Eighteenth-Century Periodicals

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Engel
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Visual Display ◽  
Elizabeth Inchbald ◽  
Mary Robinson ◽  
Sarah Siddons ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Individual Character ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Royal Women

This essay explores images of actresses, queens and princesses in late-century periodicals. Comparing portraits of Sarah Siddons, Mary Robinson, and Elizabeth Inchbald to images of Queen Charlotte and Princess Charlotte Augusta, Laura Engel argues that periodical portraits function as celebrity pin-ups (versions of the same image) as well as markers of individual character (celebrating specificity and originality), thus participating in the creation of ideas about women’s claim to fame, legitimacy, and visibility. Readers could ‘own’ an image of their favourite player by purchasing a periodical, and could also feel connected to royal women, who resembled their most cherished theatrical stars. At the same time, the legitimacy bestowed on queens and princesses transferred visually to famous actresses who appeared in very similar costumes and poses. Looking closely at the ways in which artists employed similar iconography in these portraits, suggests ways of seeing that, Engel contends, connect to contemporary modes of visual display, particularly to the repetition and serial nature of pictures on Facebook, which promote a sense of intimacy and familiarity with the portrait’s subject that is ultimately a construction. Periodical portraits thus foreground the inherent tension between formality and intimacy highlighted in images of celebrated women.

The Rise and Decline of the Epistolary Novel, 1770–1832

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ros Ballaster
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Charlotte Lennox ◽  
Frances Burney ◽  
Tobias Smollett ◽  
Charlotte Smith ◽  
Epistolary Novel ◽  
Colonial Experience ◽  
Main Protagonist ◽  
Epistolary Exchange

This essay charts the fortunes of a specific genre, the epistolary novel, which delivers plot and character exclusively through letters whether from a single correspondent, a couple, or many. In the shadow of Richardson’s dominance, there are successive attempts to innovate and experiment both of personality (presenting new kinds of voice and main protagonist) and geography (sending letter-writers to parts of the globe ‘new’ to English readers). It opens with the healthy flourishing of letter fiction from 1769 to 1780 and the twin traditions of domestic (Elizabeth Griffith, Frances Burney) and picaresque (Tobias Smollett). The epistolary mode is next experimented with in the 1790s to describe and define both revolutionary turmoil and colonial experience by authors such as Charlotte Smith, Eliza Fenwick, Phoebe Gibbes, and Charlotte Lennox. The early decades of the eighteenth century see the troubled departure from and live burial of epistolary exchange in the novels of Edgeworth, Owenson, and Scott.

scholarly journals Specimen Poetics

2017 ◽  
Vol 139 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dahlia Porter
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Charlotte Smith ◽  
Botanic Garden ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
Representational Practices ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Botanical Illustrations ◽  
Historical Model

This essay argues that the modern literary anthology—and specifically its aspiration to delimit both aesthetic merit and historical representativeness—emerged as a response to changes in eighteenth-century botanical collecting, description, and illustration. A dramatic upsurge in botanical metaphors for poetic collections around 1800 was triggered by shifts in the geographies, aims, and representational practices of botany in the previous century. Yoking Linnaean taxonomy and Buffonian vitalism to Hogarth’s line of beauty, late eighteenth-century botanical illustrations imbued plucked, pressed specimens with a new vitality. Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden (1789, 1791) translated the aesthetic reanimations of visual art into a collection of poetic specimens, spurring compilations that promote a vitalist standard of literary value. By rejecting aesthetic reanimation as the figurative ground for poetic collecting, Charlotte Smith and Robert Southey forward an alternative historical model of literary merit, one grounded in the succession and continuity of representative literary types. These competing metrics for selection and valuation underwrite the anthology as we know it today.

Bluestocking Women and Rational Female Fiction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Betty A. Schellenberg ◽  
Karen O’Brien
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Women Novelists

This chapter examines views on the emerging novel developed by a loose network of mid-eighteenth-century women who came to be known as the Bluestocking circle, and the legacy of these views for succeeding women novelists. It will look at how Frances Burney's four fictional works can be seen as furthering, while revising, this legacy within an increasingly mainstream novel tradition, but also at how ongoing resistance to this generic mainstream resulted in consistently ‘Bluestocking’ forms of rational fiction in a primarily Scottish Enlightenment context. The brief overview of Burney's rational fictions focuses on a seeming paradox in her version of the rational novel—her tendency to subject her heroines to a bout of madness.

The Letters in the Story

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eve Tavor Bannet
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
Aphra Behn ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Charlotte Lennox ◽  
Frances Burney ◽  
Women Novelists ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Epistolary Novels

The long tradition of mixta-genera fiction, particularly favoured by women novelists, which combined fully-transcribed letters and third-person narrative has been largely overlooked in literary criticism. Working with recognized formal conventions and typical thematic concerns, Tavor Bannet demonstrates how narrative-epistolary novels opposed the real, situated, transactional and instrumental character of letters, with their multi-lateral relationships and temporally shifting readings, to merely documentary uses of letters in history and law. Analyzing issues of reading and misreading, knowledge and ignorance, communication and credulity, this study investigates how novelists adapted familiar romance plots centred on mysteries of identity to test the viability of empiricism's new culture of fact and challenge positivism's later all-pervading regime of truth. Close reading of narrative-epistolary novels by authors ranging from Aphra Behn and Charlotte Lennox to Frances Burney and Wilkie Collins tracks transgenerational debates, bringing to light both what Victorians took from their eighteenth-century forbears and what they changed.

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