About the Book
Helene Moglen offers a revisionary feminist argument about the origins, cultural function, and formal structure of the English novel. While most critics and historians have associated the novel's emergence and development with the burgeoning of capitalism and the rise of the middle classes, Moglen contends that the novel princi- pally came into being in order to manage the social and psychological strains of the modern sex-gender system. Rejecting the familiar claim that realism represents the novel's dominant tradition, she shows that, from its inception in the eighteenth century, the English novel has contained both realistic and fantastic narratives, which compete for primacy within individual texts.
About the Author
Helene Moglen is Professor of English Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Among her publications are The Philosophical Irony of Laurence Sterne (1975), Charlotte Brontë The Self Conceived (1976), and Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (California, 1997), which she coedited with Elizabeth Abel and Barbara Christian.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Gender Politics of Narrative Modes
1. Daniel Defoe and the Gendered Subject of Individualism
2. Clarissa and the Pornographic Imagination
3. (W)holes and Noses: The Indeterminacies of Tristram Shandy
4. Horace Walpole and the Nightmare of History
Conclusion: The Relation of Fiction and Theory
Notes
Works Cited
Index
