Epistolary Novels Research Articles

Medieøkologien i SKAM

AbstractTo understand the success of SKAM, the series’ innovative use of “social media” must be taken into consideration. The article follows two lines of argument, one diachronic, the other synchronic. The concept of remediation allows for a historical perspective that places the series in a longer tradition of “real time”-fictions and media practices that span from the epistolary novels of the 18th century by way of radio theatre and television serials to the new media of the 21st century. Framing the series within the current media ecology (marked by the connectivity logic of “social media”), the authors analyze how the choice of the blog as the drama’s media platform has formed the ways the series succeeded in affecting and mobilizing its audience. Given the long tradition of strong pedagogical premises in the teenager serials of publicly financed Norwegian television, the authors note the absence of any explicit media critical perspectives or didacticism. Nevertheless, the claim is that the media-practices of the series, as well as the actions and discourses of its followers (blogposts, facebook-groups, etc.), generate new insights and knowledge with regards to the series’ form, content, and practices.

“Give Me the Consideration of Being the Bondsman”: Embarrassment and the Figure of the Bond in the Sentimental Fiction of Samuel Richardson

In Samuel Richardson’s sentimental, epistolary novels Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison, bonds and embarrassment con sti tute currencies of commerce and sociability. Since sociability is a framework of compulsory social and financial obligation, bondmanship, including suretyship, becomes a metaphor for the perils of reciprocal exchange, social and commercial. In Richardson’s fiction, the social effects of exchanges of literal or figurative bonds or sureties play a role in an economy of embarrass ment that also forms part of an economy of sentiment. Circulating letters become the sentimental equivalents of bonds, while bonds embody the sociability of exchange much as letters do. Still, a close reading of Richardson’s handling of the metaphor of the bond as embarrassment suggests an evolution away from the two-party arrangement in Pamela, and towards the more sophisticated three-party suretyship figuratively deployed by Sir Charles against Lady Beauchamp: the impersonal efficiency of the bondmanship by which he brokers her humiliation resembles the operation of an eighteenth-century securities market.

试论拉克洛《危险的关系》的叙事时间

文学创作是一种在时间中展开和完成的艺术。作为一种特殊的文学体裁，书信体小说是由一个或者几个人物写的书信来推进叙述的小说。在出现多个书写者的书信体小说中，作者可以通过各位人物作者的书信对于同一事件进行记录、描述以表达多种观点；也可根据情节需要变换人物作者的叙事方式，建立其所需的时间场。《危险的关系》是法国作家拉克洛的力作，作者凭借自己高超的写作能力，用175封信将整个复杂的故事内容近乎完美地表达出来，一封封看似不经意的信件不断推动情节向前发展。本文将借助叙事学理论中叙事时间对《危险的关系》进行赏析，共同领略书信体小说叙事时间的艺术魅力。 Literary writing is an art started and completed in time. Epistolary novel, a special literary genre, is a novel relying on letters of the characters to help with the narration. Multiple “letter writers” in an epistolary novel will enable the author to describe a single event through different letters to demonstrate differing points of view; he can also change the writer’s narrative method when necessary to build the certain time field(s). In his masterpiece Les Liaisons Dangereuses, the French writer Pierre Choderlos de Laclos exquisitely depicts a highly complex story with 175 seemingly advertent letters to constantly drive the plot forward. This paper will try to review and analyze Les Liaisons Dangereuses under the time theory of narratology so as to provide the readers a classic approach to enjoy the charm of narrative time in epistolary novels.

Una inconfesa novela de la Ilustración: Cartas marruecas, del Coronel Cadalso

In this paper there are studied Cartas marruecas, composed by the Colonel Don Jose Cadalso y Vazquez, as a novel of the Enlightenment. The novelistic context that fall is plotted. The narrative traditions that converge in the text and explain the composition that it has received are identified: Cervantes and Don Quixote, the epistolary novels, autobiographical fictions, travel books, the satirical novels of customs… The circumstances of its creation and its first reception are explained. Its text is analyzed, paying attention to the layout of its action, the resources used, the study of their characters, the contents that addresses, the thesis that the author wishes to convey to their receptors, the problem of their local customs.

Postal Culture: Writing and Reading Letters in Post-unification Italy. Gabriella Romani. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. Pp. x+272.

<i>Postal Culture: Writing and Reading Letters in Post-unification Italy</i>. Gabriella Romani. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. Pp. x+272.

La mort de Laclos by Didier Laroque

Reviews 259 come. In addition, there are places in her novel far below the reading level of the layman . The author should rewrite and attempt at least two if not three separate works from this one. Alliance Française de Santa Rosa (CA) Davida Brautman Laroque, Didier. La mort de Laclos. Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2014. ISBN 978-2-87673931 -4. Pp. 159. 15 a. By the early 1800s the intellectual and often libertine values of the Enlightenment were well on their way to being superseded by Romanticism’s exaltation of emotion, nature, and love. Choderlos de Laclos’s Liaisons dangereuses (1782) somewhat belatedly epitomizes the former, while Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761), though published earlier, represents the latter and, in fact, was a major factor (along with Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther) in creating the Romantic movement. Laroque’s very late entry into this field alludes to both of these French epistolary novels. Rousseau’s Saint-Preux and his beloved Julie are evoked by the names and feelings of Laroque’s protagonist and narrator, Benjamin Saint Trois de Becq, and the woman he loves, also named Julie; further, both couples’stories echo that of Abélard and Héloïse. Laclos himself represents the Enlightenment, appearing in person at the novel’s conclusion. The narration evokes eighteenth-century fiction, as do the diaries and letters, which flesh out the story; the vocabulary and style downplay exciting events while insisting on the power of love and the joys of the countryside. Saint Trois, a light-cavalry lieutenant, wants to leave the army of Napoleon to pursue a “destin contemplatif”(120), but he must overcome inertia and find enough money to live on. He is the sort of figure Joseph Campbell wrote about in The Hero with a Thousand Faces: his father is unknown, and he is sent on a dangerous journey. Helped by a series of mysterious guides, he undergoes a painful mutilation—though not, fortunately, Abélard’s—and at the end discovers his true self. At the start he gloomily “devine le monde parvenu à sa fin”(23),but at the end,“un souffle impétueux [l]’enthousiasm[e]” (158) as he starts his new life. On the literal level of the plot, while Saint Trois is stationed in Dijon in 1803, he is ordered to deliver a sealed letter to Laclos, who has recycled himself as an artillery general and is stationed near the toe of Italy’s boot, where he may be involved in a conspiracy to restore the power of the Pope over the Catholic church in France. Because the packet might contain the conspirators’ plans, Saint Trois is menaced by the anti-clerical faction, and he is also the victim of Julie’s brother, who resents his sister’s secret marriage to a man of lower birth. No supporter of the papacy and repulsed by libertinage,Saint Trois is exalted by German romanticism. In fact, he has already published a Traité de la grandeur in Berlin which, not coincidentally , has almost the same title as a previous book by his creator, Laroque, an architect by profession. This, Laroque’s first novel, is an ambitious attempt to write history and philosophy in the form of fiction. If it is not entirely successful as a novel, it is provocative and engaging. College of San Mateo (CA) Susan Petit Leclair, Bertrand. Le vertige danois de Paul Gauguin. Arles: Actes Sud, 2014. ISBN 978-2-330-02775-9. Pp. 182. 19 a. En novembre 1885, à l’âge de 36 ans, Gauguin quitte la France pour rejoindre sa femme et ses cinq enfants à Copenhague, où il restera jusqu’en juin 1886. Que s’est-il passé pendant ce court séjour nordique, peu traité par les biographes de l’artiste? C’est ce que Leclair explore dans ce roman tout à la fois biographie, étude psychologique et essai sur l’art. Leclair présente cette époque comme un tournant dans la vie d’un homme tiraillé entre son devoir familial et son désir—voire son besoin—de peindre. Ce n’est que depuis peu que Gauguin a abandonné son travail de courtier en bourse...

Le silence des femmes par Thérèse Lamartine

guerre civile et la ruine, malgré toutes les richesses en gaz, en pétrole et en ressources naturelles et humaines dont le pays dispose. Rappelant par moment Rachid Mimouni et Boualem Sansal, Khadra a fait avec une écriture superbe la radioscopie du cancer qui empoisonne l’Algérie. Université du Wisconsin, Stevens Point Alek Baylee Toumi Lamartine, Thérèse. Le silence des femmes. Québec: Triptyque, 2014. ISBN 978-289031 -920-2. Pp. 311. $25 Can. As the new millennium begins, Dr. Brian Sauvé, psychiatrist, attends a New Year’s Eve celebration with other therapists in New York. The party turns to horror when Brian discovers the dying body of a mutilated woman in the bathroom. The killer is his mentor, Dr. Martin Lucas. Will Atom Smith, detective, be able to keep Brian, his lover Maelle who has flown to his side from Paris, and his daughter Christal safe from harm? Who will protect them all, especially after a second body is discovered, that of Christal’s best friend Britney? With the crimes accomplished, the confession declared, and the criminal behind bars within the first seventy pages, where will the novel go from here? Brian attempts to pick up the pieces of his life. In doing so, he is thrown into the maelstrom of “le plus grand féminicide contemporain [...]. De la chair humaine livrée aux pires lubies. Du gibier à chasser, à violer, à fracasser, et à jeter”(95– 96). He plunges into the depths of despair as his own abuse as a child resurfaces. He must understand, not just for himself, not simply for his lover, but for his daughter and womankind as a whole. He must unearth, expose, and destroy the secret of the “machiste fondamentaliste” (127). Brian tries to comprehend why one attacks and kills women as a result of being, as a young person, exploited by a man or men. Does it have something to do with the complicit silence of the women who do not stop the aggression of the men who are committing it? As he ages and travels, he witnesses women’s violence against women, lives through his friend’s 9/11 experiences, and senses the birth of a conspiracy to wipe out all women in the world. Can Brian in his new capacity as representative for the UN Commission on Women, convince men to back off and change? “Les hommes haïssent les femmes pour ce qu’elles sont. Les femmes haïssent les hommes pour ce qu’ils font” (213). Do these two sentences summarize (wo)man’s condition in the world today? Lamartine takes her subject so widely that she loses credibility. Why, from the crime of the beginning of the novel, does she think she can eradicate mankind in a nameless time, creating a bizarre new world without appropriate preparation for it? Her horrific ending leaves a bitter taste. She has the potential for several interesting novels, but she takes on too much. She may be the director of Women’s Affairs in Canada, but her bleak worldview is an instant turnoff to this female reader. I fear I shall be haunted by her imagery for a while to 258 FRENCH REVIEW 88.3 Reviews 259 come. In addition, there are places in her novel far below the reading level of the layman . The author should rewrite and attempt at least two if not three separate works from this one. Alliance Française de Santa Rosa (CA) Davida Brautman Laroque, Didier. La mort de Laclos. Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2014. ISBN 978-2-87673931 -4. Pp. 159. 15 a. By the early 1800s the intellectual and often libertine values of the Enlightenment were well on their way to being superseded by Romanticism’s exaltation of emotion, nature, and love. Choderlos de Laclos’s Liaisons dangereuses (1782) somewhat belatedly epitomizes the former, while Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761), though published earlier, represents the latter and, in fact, was a major factor (along with Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther) in creating the Romantic movement. Laroque’s very late entry into this field alludes to both of these French epistolary novels. Rousseau’s Saint-Preux and his...

The Observer in the Picture: Surface and Depth in a Passage from Proust

The Observer in the Picture:Surface and Depth in a Passage from Proust Noam Scheindlin (bio) In the orthodox version of externally-narrated fiction, the questions, “who speaks,” “who writes,” and “who sees,” when directed toward the narrator or narrating agency, are non-productive ones from the perspective of the world that is narrated. To ask these questions would require moving from the world of the story and into the world of the author; or, at the very least, one would be required to make use of a critical construct such as that of the “implied author,” in order to transgress—albeit in fiction—the fictional frame.1 The purely external narrator speaks or writes from a perspective that is disengaged from any responsibility as an actor in the world, in order to become pure observer. The inability to assign a perspective to such a narrator while remaining solely within the frame of the work proper has long served as an index of the fictional. In the case of internally-narrated fiction, and particularly when the narrator is also the hero of the narrative (Gérard Genette’s “autodiegetic” narrative),2 the issue becomes more complicated, because here [End Page 855] the narrator’s allegiances are split between that of actor and observer. But because of the incompatibility of these two roles (and in particular because the act of writing can never coincide with the content of what is written), the narrator qua narrator cannot simply inhabit the role of actor while engaging, at the same time, in the act of narrating.3 This becomes a problematic for modernity in its concern with, as Jonathan Crary describes it, “remaking the individual as observer into something calculable and regularizable and … human vision into something measurable and thus exchangeable” (17). We see in the modern novel the tendency, in narration, to emphasize the experience of the narrator—and to account for his or her presence. This is very different from, for example, the “chatty” external narrators of the English novels of the eighteenth century, whose authorial intrusions generally serve the function of asserting the narrator’s presence, but who do so without attempting to establish a narrative plane that houses both authors and character, or in the epistolary novels of the same period, where the lack of space between narrator and character conceal the contours of the issue. That the problematic relation between the observing self who narrates and the experiencing self who is narrated is an issue for Proust from very early on can be seen in an excerpt from a letter that he writes at age sixteen to his philosophy teacher Alphonse Darlu at the Lycée Condorcet: Quand je lis par exemple un poème de Leconte de Lisle, tandis que j’y goûte les voluptés infinies d’autrefois, l’autre moi me considère, s’amuse à considérer les causes de mon plaisir, les voit dans un certain rapport entre moi et l’œuvre, par là détruit la certitude de la beauté propre de l’œuvre, [End Page 856] surtout imagine immédiatement des conditions de beauté opposées, tue enfin presque tout mon plaisir. (qtd. in Tadié, 108)4 The kind of immersion that Proust describes before his other self intrudes has long been understood as an essential component of the aesthetic experience. Michael Fried, for example, in his analysis of eighteenth-century French painting, describes it as “the supreme fiction of the observer’s nonexistence” (108). If absorption in one’s life is to be represented in painting, Fried argues, there can be no connection between the realm of the beholder and that of the painted subject, because the very possibility of absorption is founded in the notion that there is no one watching; the subject is simply “there.” Indeed, we might say that fiction is born here, as a register that is heterogeneous to that of the “real” observer. On the contrary, in Proust’s letter, the “autre moi” who observes disrupts the reader’s immersion in the work in order to establish a connection between the actual reader and the work he reads. This effectively does away with the aesthetic illusion...

Epistolary voices. The case of Elisabeth Wolff and Agatha Deken

The article focuses on two related issues: authorship distinction and the analysis of characters’ voices in fiction. It deals with the case of Elisabeth Wolff and Agatha Deken, two women writers from the Netherlands who collaboratively published several epistolary novels at the end of the 18th century. First, the task division between the two authors will be analysed based on their usage of words and their frequencies. Next, any stylistic differences between the characters (letter writers) will be dealt with. The focus lies on Wolff’s and Deken’s first joint novel, Sara Burgerhart (1782). As to the authorship, nothing clearly showed a clear task division, which implies that Deken’s and Wolff’s writing styles are very much alike. This confirms findings of other scholars, who found that collaborating authors jointly produce a style that is distinguishable from both authors’ personal styles. As to stylistic differences in the voices of the characters in Sara Burgerhart, it was found that only a couple of the letter writers are clearly distinguishable compared with the main characters in the novel. I experimented with two possible tools to zoom in on the exact differences between those characters, but the methods are still too subjective to my taste. In the follow-up research, I will look further than words and their frequencies as building stones of literary style.

Les complexes familiaux dans les romans épistolaires du xviiie siècle (Rousseau et Laclos)

Cette communication propose d’analyser les complexes familiaux dans les romans de Rousseau et de Laclos à travers l’application de quelques théories lacaniennes. La démarche d’analyse proposée par Lacan dans son « séminaire sur La Lettre volée » nous fournit les instruments pour étudier les relations triangulaires entre les personnages de nos romans afin de mettre en discussion les relations parentales, la figure de l’autorité, ses personnifications et ses incarnations dans le but d’identifier un rapport entre la structure familiale et la structure de l’Etat au temps de l’Ancien Régime.Dans La Nouvelle Héloïse, aussi bien M. d’Etange que M. de Wolmar sont des figures représentant la loi paternelle et exerçant leur autorité sur Julie. Si d’un côté les figures autoritaires changent, de l’autre la figure de Julie reste inaltérée: elle joue constamment la fonction de fille soumise à l’autorité ’paternelle`. Seulement la fin du roman nous montre un changement radicale. Julie s’empare de l’autorité ; elle va ainsi personnifier la loi symbolique et, pour la première fois dans le roman, les figures ’paternelles` disparaissent. Julie ou La nouvelle Héloïse, en tant que roman clé du XVIIIe siècle, se fait reflet de la mise en discussion des symboles monarchiques : la disparition des figures paternelles symbolise ainsi la faiblesse du pouvoir royal. Les Liaisons dangereuses de Laclos affrontent de façon différente la problématique de l’autorité. L’absence initiale des figures paternelles permet l’incarnation de l’autorité dans le personnage féminin de Mme de Merteuil présentée à la fois comme paladin de l’ordre social et destructrice des différences de genre. Cependant, la figure du père est réhabilitée à la fin du roman à travers le personnage de Prévan à l’intérieur d’une société détruite par la figure de Mme de Merteuil là où Prévan prétend représenter la loi paternelle. Il voudrait personnifier une fonction autoritaire qui, malheureusement, n’est plus justifiée par l’image du roi, désormais, absent et impuissant dans la société française. Le roman de Laclos, écrit en 1782, se fait finalement porteur de la dissolution de la société de l’Ancien Régime. Prévan personnifie aussi bien la corruption que l’immoralité de la société et devient en plus un personnage caricatural et grotesque car il célèbre une autorité paternelle qui n’existe plus. La Révolution française permettra de franchir une étape très importante en relation avec notre thèse. En décapitant le roi, le peuple détruit en quelque sorte tous les symboles sur lesquels se fondait la monarchie ; il détruit ainsi le corpus mysticum personnifié par le roi mettant fin au pouvoir monarchique. Les deux corps du roi- le corps charnel ainsi que le corps symbolique- sont finalement supprimés. Cette communication veut mettre en relief le lien étroit qui existe entre l’Etat et les structures familiales. La destruction du noyau familial est enfin liée à la dissolution du corps politique représenté par la monarchie.

Slaps at/for Dignity: Hope Keshubi's Rebellious Legacy of Social Transformation

This paper addresses two 1997 epistolary novels, To a Young Woman and Going Solo , by late Ugandan author Hope Keshubi, which offer a programmatic reading of Uganda's contemporary problems. Keshubi's primary agenda in these novels is to promote dialogue on the following social and political issues concerning women: sexual health, sexual maturation, domestic violence (wife battery and paternal abuse), subjugating traditions, discriminatory inheritance laws, and social relations between mistress and wife. This paper examines how Keshubi deftly works against patriarchal constraints on speech and actions, which have real and harmful consequences on the lives of Ugandan girls and women. Keshubi's texts show women they can triumph over discrimination and taboos, surviving physically and psychologically in the Uganda of the 1990s. This paper examines current denigrating literary reception of Ugandan women authors and asks why Keshubi did not experience demeaning reception a decade prior. In Keshubi's works, it is the private act of a female narrator writing to a female addressee that constitutes agency and her contribution to society, keenly shown in To a Young Woman and Going Solo , provides a new social vision of emotional transformation through prior unimagined dialogues. This paper presents hereto-unknown information about Hope Keshubi.

Napoleonic Friendship: Military Fraternity, Intimacy, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century France by Brian Joseph Martin

MARTIN, BRIAN JOSEPH. Napoleonic Friendship: Military Fraternity, Intimacy, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century France. Durham: UP of New Hampshire, 2011. ISBN 978-158465 -956-3. Pp. xvii + 379. $39.95. This book examines the evolution of a military model of intimacy and affection between male soldiers in nineteenth-century France. The author draws on archival military memoirs and literary fiction to trace the development of homosocial ‘Napoleonic friendships’ in the Grande Armée that ultimately culminates with modernity’s gay soldier. In his introduction, Martin outlines various homoerotic theories of combat, from antiquity to modern days, citing in particular the work of nineteenth-century military theorists who placed an emphasis on physical and emotional intimacy among soldiers as a strategy for stronger, more cohesive armies. The revolutionary military reforms of 1789–99 made these relationships possible as they transformed recruitment and training practices and socialized soldiers as fraternal and devoted equals. In part one (of three), Martin identifies the three forms of Napoleonic friendship of the Grande Armée: “lateral relationships between soldiers of similar rank, compassionate relationships between leaders and their men, and devotional relationships between soldiers and their superiors” (49). Perhaps appropriately, Martin’s archival research strongly suggests that Napoleon himself engaged in this eponymous model of homoeroticism. While he does not go so far as to conclude that Napoleon participated in sexual relations with any of his officers, Martin’s astute reading of archival letters between the Emperor and one of his generals reveals an intimacy characterized by affection and seduction. In his next chapter, Martin turns to a genre whose interest lies in its slippage between history and fiction: the Napoleonic military memoir. Drawing on Philippe Lejeune’s work on autobiography, Martin considers the published memoirs of three of Napoleon’s officers and establishes a compelling link between these personal historical accounts of combat and friendship and the Napoleonic military fiction that he examines in part two. In this subsequent section devoted entirely to the battle at Waterloo in post-1815 Napoleonic fiction, Martin convincingly reads Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir as an allegory for the Napoleonic military closet and Balzac’s recurring veteran pairs in La comédie humaine as the products of military ideologies that discouraged heterosexual contact and marriage. His discussion of Hugo’s military memory in Les misérables, however, seems to stray at times from the work’s larger themes and intentions. Part three examines Napoleonic friendship from the Restoration to the Second Empire (1815–70) in the works of Balzac, Maupassant, and Zola. In his continued discussion of La comédie humaine, Martin identifies an evolving model of the Napoleonic family during the Restoration and July Monarchy that centers on surrogate military fathers and sons. In his final chapter, Martin turns to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the anti-militarist fiction that materialized following France’s emasculating defeat. Perhaps of most interest in his discussion of Maupassant and Zola is the link that he establishes between the nineteenthcentury model of Napoleonic friendship and the homosexual soldier that surfaced alongside nationalistic discourses on masculinity. Indeed, in his conclusion, Martin argues that Proust’s Le temps retrouvé marked the emergence of the gay soldier in the French literary tradition. While the figure of Saint-Loup went on to influence the homoerotic works of writers such as Cocteau and Gide, Martin persuasively reminds us that the roots of this evolving homosexual military culture date back to the revolutionary days of the late eighteenth century. Reviews 577 One of the greatest strengths of Martin’s Napoleonic Friendship is that it reaches across multiple disciplines in history, literature, art, and gender studies. Perhaps of most interest to literary scholars is the fact that Martin also perceptively recognizes the intertextuality within these nineteenth-century memoirs and novels and situates them against a long tradition of French epic poems, epistolary novels, and pastoral romances. Though a bit repetitive at times, overall this timely study poignantly resonates with modern-day discussions regarding gays in the American military. University of Central Florida Sharon Larson O’DEA, MICHAEL, éd. Rousseau et les philosophes. SVEC 2010:12. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2010. ISBN 978-0-7294-1004-5...

Richardson and Copyright

Samuel Richardson’s Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded (1741) was one of the earliest of the moralizing epistolary novels that became commercially popular with the new reading middle class. It was also subject to widespread literary piracy, published in unauthorized editions, serialized in newspapers and literary magazines, and beset by sequels, satires, and parodies. As such, it became a benchmark for how the new novel form would be treated under law and equity after passage of the Statute of Anne, England’s first copyright law. Tracing Richardson’s efforts to enjoin copyright infringement of Pamela is however not an easy task, as court records are elusive, but publication history and patterns of newspaper advertising allow his one recorded claim in Chancery court to be reconstructed, revealing many of the nuances of early copyright doctrine as it evolved in the mid-18th century.

“SOMETHING IN MME DE GENLIS STILE”: GEORGIANA, DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE'S “ZILLIA”, PLAYWRITING AND FEMALE ARISTOCRATIC AUTHORSHIP

Famous as a salonnière, fashion icon and supporter of the Whig Party, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (1757–1806) was also a prolific writer, author of two epistolary novels, numerous poems and at least six manuscript plays. Just as she is in the process of being rediscovered as a novelist and poet, this article explores her even less well-known ambitions as a dramatist and her complex involvement in the theatrical world. The main focus is on the Duchess's earliest surviving play “Zillia” (1782), which is illuminating in connection to her development as a playwright, her interest in closet drama, and the pedagogical and political dimensions of her dramatic works. Particular attention is devoted to the ways in which Devonshire uses the language and discourse of sensibility to sketch an ideal of female aristocratic citizenship. The author also looks at the dynamics between the play and the work it was inspired by, Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis's Théâtre à l'usage des jeunes personnes (Theatre of Education, 1779–80), which illustrate the anxieties surrounding debates about acting and its subversive potential, and the complex cultural appropriation of “foreign” drama in late eighteenth-century Britain. Additionally, the author shows how Devonshire's ambivalent comments on Genlis in her correspondence reflect her anxieties about her own authorship. Finally, the article briefly assesses the affinities between experimental “closet drama”, pedagogical plays and elite culture.

Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem of Resistance, 1660–1760

Reviewed by: Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem of Resistance, 1660–1760 E.L. Devlin (bio) Toni Bowers. Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem of Resistance, 1660–1760. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. 320 pp. $110.00. At the end of Samuel Richardson’s novel The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753–54), the eponymous hero, following the collapse (on religious grounds) of his engagement to the Italian Catholic Clementina della Poretta, marries the English Protestant, Harriet Byron. In a letter quoted by Toni Bowers in the coda of Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem of Resistance, Richardson concludes that Charles will forever be torn between his two sympathetic loves: “A divided Heart he must ever have” (301). This sentiment suggests the broader concerns of Bowers’s readings of seduction fiction against the background of James II ’s deposition in 1688, the Jacobite threat toward the succeeding Protestant monarchy, and the evolution of Tory political identities and ideologies in an era dominated by Whig preferment. In this reading the genre is highly political, and amatory narratives are used to delineate the ways Tories explored their compromised principles after the Glorious Revolution. Although the idea of “seduction fiction” seems attuned to commonplace assumptions about Charles II ’s court and its culture of sex and merriment, it was almost a century later, in Richardson’s Pamela (1740–41) and Clarissa (1748–49), that the genre found its most enduring exemplars. Bowers traces that evolution from the writings of the Restoration court propagandist Roger l’Estrange (whose Five Love-Letters from a Nun to a Cavalier [1678] is an epistolary account of a Portuguese nun’s doomed romance) through detailed readings of writings by Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood as well as Richardson’s more famous works. Her book explores the connections between a genre preoccupied with the sexual, romantic, and matrimonial [End Page 123] dynamics of men and women, and broader political and social questions of authority, obedience, and subjecthood. Bowers’s book is extremely useful as an introduction to tomes with melodramatic plots that engaged enthusiastic contemporary audiences. The argument that they form a coherent genre of seduction or amatory writing is well made. They are usually epistolary novels that repeat narrative plot points, images, and ideas, and Bowers charts how their broader thematic concerns paralleled the evolution of partisan—primarily Tory—thought in the decades after the Glorious Revolution. As Bowers’s title suggests, Restoration and Augustan seduction stories were shaped by the tropes of “force” and “fraud,” terms frequently paired together to suggest that all men satiated their lust through violence or found wives through deception. Rape, or its contemplation, is a recurring motif in these texts, which are often freighted with images of men observing sleeping women whose provocatively arranged clothing heightens both potential threat and intense desire. These contemplative acts—men thinking about, but not necessarily acting upon, the possibility of violence, or women desiring men who will ultimately abuse them—are central to Bowers’s argument about evolving Tory ideas, and the shifting nature of victimhood they suggest. Early seventeenth-century texts could reflect the legal argument that seduction or rape was an assault, not on the daughter, but on the patriarchal father, and many instances of amatory fiction present the female victim of force or fraudulent seduction as complicit in her own downfall. The kernel of her own desire for the seducer denies her true and honest virtue, and this idea intertwines with authors’ representations of male sexuality. In Manley’s The New Atalantis (1709), Bowers argues that “the plot of besieged virtue turns out to be complicated by elements of complicity already resident in the victim” (108). As Bowers points out, these texts assumed it a truism that male sexual interest was intensified by womanly resistance. The conquest and defeat of this resistance is central to the heterosexual relationships of amatory fiction, whether the plot ends with marriage or more explicitly tragic consequences. Seduced heroines are a “paradoxical combination . . . of resistance and complicity, victimized innocence and transgressive desire” (71), and Bowers’s book raises many interesting points about the representation of gendered power...

Framing National, Literary, and Gender Identities in Early American Epistolary Fiction

Much of the historical appeal of early epistolary fiction arises from the contradictions involved in the fictional scheme of turning private documents into a public book. This highly transgressive feature turns epistolary novels into heuristic forms where cultural tensions, the limits of the private and the public sphere as well as the limits of the body can be gauged. As a crucial mediating interface, the construction of the communicative situation in early American fiction provides a reward...

The Epistolary Novel and Samuel Richardson’s Heroines: Female Writers and Readers of Letters

The epistolary novel, as developed and refined by Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), is concerned with distinctly private experience and the morality of individuals-Richardson`s heroine writers. In contrast to nineteenth-century novels, which explore their subjects through the overview of a narrator with a singular moral outlook, the epistolary narrative allows Richardson to examine the various different ways in which individuals/heroines interpret, mold, and respond to their experiences in writing. In this paper, I argue that the authorial voice of Richardson does not control the narrative but rather is present in the prefaces, character sketches, notes and occasional interjections between letters. Although there is little doubt as to whether Richardson intended to make a particular moral point or attempted to control the effect of his novels on his readers, the heroines and their letters dominate the novels so that they put the authorial suggestions in a different light, reducing the author`s to one voice among several. Thus, Pamela`s letters are exemplary for the vigor and intelligence with which they appear to be written, rather than for the imposed morality of their ghost writer-Richardson. Although Clarissa is of a different social class from Pamela, both heroines are united in their oppression as victims of a patriarchal society. In Clarissa`s letters, the heroine`s situation and experience are seen through her own writing in dialogue with that of her confidante Anna Howe, and in contrast to the writing of her oppressors. Clarissa, then, becomes a struggle between different discourses in which their genesis and effect, and the societies and individuals from which they come are implicitly suggested in Richardson`s text. While Richardson may or may not be guilty of taking the writing of women and using it for his own ends, his epistolary novels represent a deliberate and bold attempt to shape the novel in a way conducive to his heroines and to women writers.

Den sentimentala romanen och kampen om medborgarskap: Rousseaus Julie och Staëls Delphine

&lt;p&gt;The sentimental novel and the struggle for citizenship: Rousseau&amp;rsquo;s &lt;em&gt;Julie &lt;/em&gt;and Sta&amp;euml;l&amp;rsquo;s&lt;em&gt; Delphine&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The tragic fates of a great number of women in sentimental novels of the eighteenth century can be viewed against the background of classic liberal theory. They provide examples of how individual freedom and restraint in the name of common good can be reconciled. Faced with the impossible choice between a life guided by the principle of love and that of virtue, women often choose self-sacrifice as a means of preserving a sense of individuality in the face of the demands of public universality. The epistolary novels, &lt;em&gt;Julie ou La Nouvelle H&amp;eacute;lo&amp;iuml;se &lt;/em&gt;(1761) of Jean Jacques Rousseau and the &lt;em&gt;Delphine &lt;/em&gt;(1802) of Germaine de Sta&amp;euml;l, present two rather different treatments of this problem. Rousseau&amp;rsquo;s Julie is a woman whose unquenchable desire transforms her into a prototype of female unreliability not worthy of societal recognition. Sta&amp;euml;l&amp;rsquo;s Delphine, in turn, unmasks a ruthless and unprincipled society which prohibits her from becoming its full-fledged member.&lt;/p&gt;

Samuel Richardsons brevromaner

En litteraturhistorisk placering The Epistolary Novels of Samuel Richardson: Reconsidering the Historical PerspectiveThe epistolary novels of Samuel Richardson were received with enthusiasm throughout Britain and Europe upon their publication in the 1740s and 50s, and they have had their unquestioned place in the literary canon and the literary history of the 18th century, as well as in the many rivalling Rise of the Novel narratives, ever since. The qualities of Richardson’s novels praised by contemporary reading audiences and professional critics were to some extent the qualities we still acknowledge in the the works. And yet I propose to reconsider and modify our ‘historical’ understanding of Richardson’s novels. Richardson scholars from the 1970s onward have deepened our understanding of the contexts of Richardson’s life and writing, and they have shown to what extent both the style, the form, the motifs, and the themes of his novels must be placed alongside the works of rival authors, today much less known, and the comedies and tragedies of the restoration period, just to mention two important fields of inspiration for Richardson. On the basis of their findings we must conclude that the novels we read today when considering Richardson’s works as part of a formal literary history are not quite the same as the novels contemporary readers cherished. There are important differences as well as correspondences between the contemporary reception of Richardson’s works and the reception of professional scholars in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Intricate Relations: Sexual and Economic Desire in American Fiction, 1789-1814 (review)

Intricate Relations: Sexual and Economic Desire in American Fiction, 1789-1814. By Karen A. Weyler. (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005. Pp. x, 269. Cloth, $39.95.)Karen Weyler's work situates a variety of early American novels within a larger cultural context of conduct manuals, political pamphlets, economic tracts, and medical treatises to argue that in the early republic, themes of sexual and economic regulation pervaded and nonfiction alike. She asserts that the use of the epistolary mode and the repeated use of tropes such as self discipline, seduction, female madness, and economic speculation reveal cultural anxieties about sexual and economic activity and a desire to regulate reader behavior (2). By combining a variety of approaches-cultural history, intellectual history, book history, and literary analysis-Weyler positions her study as furthering the important work of scholars such as Cathy N. Davidson (in Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America [1986]), Linda Kerber (Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America [1980, 1986]), David Shields (Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America [1997]), Carla Mulford (in her introduction to The Power of Sympathy and The Coquette [1996]), and Michael Warner (The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America [1990]).According to Weyler, sexual and economic issues in the American novel constituted but homologous forms of expenditure and exchange (25). She argues that novels for and about women were largely concerned with the regulation of sexual activity, while the regulation of economic behavior was constructed as a primary concern for men. This gendered assumption about the aims of novelistic discourse is grounded in the separate spheres ideology that draws distinctions between the masculine, public sphere and the feminine, private sphere. It informs not only Weyler's readings of the texts, but also the organization of her own four-chapter study, which first addresses the regulation of female sexuality and moves on to the regulation of male economic behavior.Weyler opens her discussion of early American by questioning the popularity of the epistolary novel. She argues that during this period, the choice to write a novel of letters was ideological, not just aesthetic. Epistolary novels modeled the kind of self-scrutiny and self-regulation that young women were supposed to develop in order to maintain their virtue. Such texts also highlighted a kind of transparency that this audience should seek to develop in their own correspondence. Examining works such as William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy, Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette, and Judith Sargent Murray's The Story of Margaretta alongside Lockean educational theories and advice manuals, Weyler explains that young women were encouraged, like the fictional Margaretta, to lay their souls bare to a moral preceptor (41). The dialogue between writer and mentor the development of a virtuous character and the ability to assess the character of others, both of which were seen as important to the formation of a virtuous republic.Weyler continues her book with a discussion of seduction novels, viewing them in conjunction with legal and medical discourses regarding female sexuality. During the early national period, fiction became a surrogate for the law in the regulation of female chastity in that it assisted in the pathologizing of extramarital sexual desire and helped to provide social structure during a period of changing attitudes toward sexual morality (25). …