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Full Description
Discussions about the development of the novel often jump directly from the 1740s, when Richardson and Fielding were particularly successful, to the 1770's, when women supposedly entered the marketplace in greater numbers. The little scholarship that focuses on the British novel in the 1750s has primarily addressed male output and concluded that the genre was faltering and in danger of extinction. Masters of the Marketplace is the first volume specifically to assess the importance of the 1750s in literary history and to argue that women novelists engaged in critical renovation of the novel as a genre and reclaimed it as a proto-feminist project. This book highlights how these women controlled their literary circumstances, mining their prospects and nimbly responding to the changing literary marketplace, the emergent domestic ideals, varied reader responses, shifting notions of genre, and new developments in epistemology. Their texts spoke in more pointed ways to societal inadequacies, and their use of amatory and sentimental fiction, two categories often ridiculed, in fact produced transgressive results. Thus they were masters of, rather than mistresses to, a rapidly changing publishing world. Indeed, in the 1750s women and men's novel output was nearly equal. The most prolific women authors of this decade, Sarah Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, and Sarah Scott, were among the ten top producers of new fiction. Thus, women novelists had arrived at a crucial intersection in literary history when their interest in fostering public personae merged with a more amenable marketplace. This collection of essays shows how women took advantage of the brief window of opportunity and made an essential contribution to literary history.
Contents
Chapter 1 Introduction Part 2 Part I: Challenging the Status Quo Chapter 3 Chapter 1: Marriage in Haywood; or, Amatory Reading Rewarded Chapter 4 Chapter 2: The Unprotected Woman in Eliza Haywood's The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy Chapter 5 Chapter 3: Lives, Letters, and Tales in Sarah Scott's Journey Through Every Stage of Life Part 6 Part II: Educations in Epistemology Chapter 7 Chapter 4: Sarah Fielding's Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia and the British Historical Novel Chapter 8 Chapter 5: Arabella Unbound: Wit, Judgment, and the Cure of Lennox's Female Quixote Chapter 9 Chapter 6: Henrietta on Page and Stage Part 10 Part III: Creating Community Chapter 11 Chapter 7: The "latent seeds of coquetry": Amatory Fiction and the 1750s Novel Chapter 12 Chapter 8: "The Sole Business of Ladies in Romances": Sharing Histories in Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote Chapter 13 Chapter 9: "to such as are willing to understand": Considering Fielding's Community of Imagined Readers Part 14 Part IV: Performing in the Literary Marketplace Chapter 15 Chapter 10: The Afterlife and Strange Surprising Adventures of Haywood's Amatories (with Thoughts on Betsy Thoughtless) Chapter 16 Chapter 11: Reading Female Readers: The Female Quixote and Female Quixotism Chapter 17 Chapter 12: Putting Woemn in Their Place: Locating Women Novelists in the 1750s
