Representing Women and Female Desire From Arcadia to Jane Eyre

Marea Mitchell, Dianne Osland

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN:
  9781403943316
• eBook ISBN:
  9780230504370
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book examines continuities and changes in narrative strategies deployed to deal with female desire in a broad range of fiction from the late sixteenth-century to the early nineteenth-century. By focussing on 'designing women' and the lengths to which they can and should go as agents of their desires, this book investigates the way generic and moral or social issues intersect in the depiction of female subjectivity. The book examines narrative strategies deployed in the representation of female desire in a broad range of fiction from the late sixteenth-century to the early-nineteenth century, discussing key texts such as Jane Eyre, Pamela, Pride and Prejudice and Arcadia

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Women of Great Wit: Designing Women in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia
• 2 ‘Free Gift Was What He Wished’: Negotiating Desire in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania
• 3 Stratagems and Seeming Constraints, or, How to Avoid Being a ‘Grey-hounds Collar’
• 4 ‘A Scheme of Virtuous Politics’: Governing the Self in ‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity’ (1656), The History of the Nun (1689), Love Intrigues (1713), and Love in Excess (1720)
• 5 Poor in Everything But Will: Richardson’s Pamela
• 6 Turret Love and Cottage Hate: Coming Down to Earth in Pamela 2 and The Female Quixote
• 7 ‘It Was Happy She Took a Good Course’: Saving Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice
• 8 Agitating Risk and Romantic Chance: Going All the Way with Jane Eyre?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index