Eighteenth-Century Female Voices: Education and the Novel

By: Augustin-Bech, Sabine

This work focuses on the issue of women's education in a series of novels written by women in the second half of the eighteenth century. On the one hand, the surface plots are conservative, thus reaffirming the social order; on the other hand, numerous subversive narrative techniques undermine the surface stories, drawing attention to the consequences of the arbitrary limitations society imposed on middle-class women as well as to the sense of entrapment and the resulting anxieties they experienced. In showing the increasing female readership ways to negotiate between the behavioural codes of a patriarchal society and their own need for personal freedom, these novels can be read as early feminist critiques of society.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 3631529147
• ISBN13: 9783631529140
• Release Date: February 2005
• Publisher: Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der W
• Length: 236 Pages
• Weight: 0.66 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.8" x 8.3"