Law, Sensibility and the Sublime in Eighteenth-Century Women's Fiction: Speaking of Dread

by Chaplin,Sue

• ISBN13: 9780754633068
• ISBN10: 0754633063
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-04-28
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

This work offers a fresh historical, philosophical and cultural interpretation of the relation between the eighteenth-century discourse of sensibility, the sublime and the theory and practice of eighteenth-century law. It exposes and explores the influence of this combination of discourses upon the formation of gender identities in the period and examines the presence, within eighteenth-century fiction by women, of a new female subject. Novels by women in this period, Chaplin posits, begin to reveal that the female subject position constructed through the discourses of law, sensibility and the sublime gives rise, for women, to a feminine ontological crisis that anticipates by two hundred years the trauma of the 'post modern' male subject unable to present a unified subjectivity to himself or to the world. This feminine crisis finds expression within a range of female fiction of the mid-to-late eighteenth century-in Charlotte Lennox's anti-romance satire, Frances Sheridan's 'conduct-book' novels, the Gothic romances of Radcliffe and Eliza Fenwick and the sensationalistic horror fiction of Charlotte Dacre.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	vi
Introduction: Speaking of Dread	1	(10)
1 Sublime Bodies and Bodies of Law	11	(30)
2 A Material Transcendence: The Clarissa Ideal	41	(20)
3 Femininity and the Law of Romance: Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote	61	(20)
4 The Discipline of Sensibility: Frances Sheridan's The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph	81	(26)
5 Speaking of Dread: Eliza Fenwick's Secresy, or The Ruin on the Rock	107	(20)
6 Tenor Transcendence and Control in Ann Radcliffe's The Italian and Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya, or The Moor	127	(18)
Conclusion	145	(6)
Bibliography	151	(8)
Index	159