Description
Book SynopsisThe first study to treat feminine compliance as something other than a passive, politically neutral exercise, Ingenuous SubjectionHelen Thompson recovers in this practice the domestic novel's critical engagement with the limits of Enlightenment modernity.
Trade Review"Thompson has written a significant, much-needed book that has the potential to re-energize the study of eighteenth-century British novels, fiction by women writers especially." * Deidre Lynch, Indiana University *
"Helen Thompson's brilliant and persuasive new study makes clear that domestic fiction can best be seen as a theoretical battleground, where the debate about the political philosophy of personal agency, and women's paradoxical place within it, is staged and restaged throughout the long eighteenth century." * Cora Kaplan, University of Southampton *
Table of ContentsIntroduction
PART I. INGENUOUS SUBJECTION AND FEMININE POLITICAL DIFFERENCE
1. Boys, Girls, and Wives: Post-Patriarchal Power and the Problem of Feminine Subjection
2. Mushrooms, Subjects, and Women: The Hobbesian Individual and the Domestic Novel
3. "The Words Command and Obey": Pamela and Domestic Modernity
PART II. INGENUOUS SUBJECTION AND THE NOVEL
4. Eliza Haywood's Philosophical Career: Ingenuous Subjection and Moral Physiology
5. Charlotte Lennox and the Agency of Romance: Ingenuous Subjection and Genre
6. Frances Sheridan's "disingenuous girl": Ingenuous Subjection and Epistolary Form
Conclusion: "Marriage has bastilled me for life": Mary Wollstonecraft's Domestic Novel
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
