Seductive Forms Women's Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740

by Ballaster, Ros

• ISBN13: 9780198184775
• ISBN10: 0198184778
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1998-06-11
• Publisher: Clarendon Press

Summary

Historicist and feminist accounts of the 'rise of the novel' have neglected the phenomenon of the professional woman writer in England prior to the advent of the sentimental novel in the 1740s. Seductive Forms explores the means by which the three leading Tory women novelists of the lateseventeenth and early eighteenth centuries challenged and reworked both contemporary gender ideologies and generic convention. The seduction plot provided Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood with a vehicle for dramatizing their own appropriation of the 'masculine' power offiction-making. Seduction is employed in these fictions as a metaphor for both novelistic production (the seduction of the reader by the writer) and party political machination (the seduction of the public by the politician). This challenging and lively book also explores the debts early prosefiction owed to French seventeenth-century models of fiction-writing and argues that Behn, Manley, and Haywood succeed in producing a distinctively 'English' and female 'form' for the amatory novel.

Table of Contents

Introduction	1	(6)
I. GENDER AND GENRE	7	(62)
1. The Rise of the Novel: Gender and Genre in Theories of Prose Fiction	7	(24)
2. Observing the Forms: Amatory Fiction and the Construction of a Female Reader	31	(38)
II. WOMEN WRITERS	69	(127)
3. `A Devil on't, the Woman Damns the Poet': Aphra Behn's Fictions of Feminine Identity	69	(45)
4. `A Genius for Love': Sex as Politics in Delarivier Manley's Scandal Fiction	114	(39)
5. `Preparatives to Love': Fiction as Seduction in Eliza Haywood's Amatory Prose	153	(43)
Conclusion: The Decline of Amatory Fiction: Re(de)fining the Female Form	196	(16)
Bibliography	212	(15)
Index	227