Elizabeth Singer Rowe and the Development of the English Novel (original) (raw)

Forbidden passion in The Lover and Wuthering Heights

2017

The key to understanding the romance between Catherine and Heathcliff is its obsessive and all consuming nature, a ferocity of desire that exceeds even the realm of the sexual, it is a profoundly metaphysical longing in which Catherine cannot conceive of herself without her metaphysical Other Heathcliff, they are two parts of a whole as Catherine declares that “I am Heathcliff”. Life without him is futile and meaningless because she is only completed as a human being in and through her existence with Heathcliff.While Heathcliff is dark, destructive and brutal, one is brought to admire the intensity of his desire for Catherine as an all consuming passion that will haunt him throughout his life and bring him to long to be reunited with Catherine in death. The Lover is a book about a teenage girl who was physically and emotionally abused by her mother and elder brother. She felt unable to control her predicament.She sought solace and control through her passionate affair with a wealthy...

“Romance or Novel?: Eliza Haywood’s The Fortunate Foundlings.”

The International Conference on Narrative. The International Society for the Study of Narrative. University of Amsterdam, 16-18 June 2016., 2016

Even though recent criticism has began to include early women writers such as Eliza Haywood in the history of the novel, these writings pose some problems within the current understanding of the genre. Since Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel published in 1957, the novel has been definedas prose fiction that reflects the values, needs, and epistemological basis of the middle classes.From this perspective, many early women novelists remain marginal because the representation of the human being in their work does not correspond to the particular individual of the novel genre when it is defined as prose fiction that is based on social realism. The individual and gender roles in these writings belong to the aristocratic culture and the epistemology this culture relies on. Love and sexuality has a central place in these writings but they differ from the treatment of sexuality in the realist novel. To illustrate this point, I will discuss the representations of the individual and gender roles in Eliza Haywood's 1744 novel The Fortunate Foundlings. To discuss the representation of sexuality, I will draw on Nancy Armstrong's argument that the production of the feminine ideal is the main project of the realist novel in the eighteenth century. I will argue that the feminine ideal in The Fortunate Foundlingsis part of a worldview of an unquestionable, eternal order where the individual's position and value is determined by its birth in opposition to the feminine ideal in the realist novel,which gains its value in psychological terms and achieves development by experience.

On the Tragedy of Love in The Scarlet Letter

Studies in Literature and Language, 2011

Nathaniel Hawthorne, the great romantic novelist of the 19th century, is one of the founders of American literature. Influenced by the times and social background, family origin and life experiences, his novels reflect a strong flavor of Puritan ideology. In his masterpiece The Scarlet Letter , Hawthorne tells a story of tragedy of love. This thesis analyzes the causes of the tragedy of love from three aspects. By analyzing the three main characters' different personalities, the thesis reveals the internal reason of the tragedy. This thesis also deals with women's status and dark society at that time, showing the influence of the environmental factors of the tragedy. In addition, it also focuses on Hawthorne's life experiences and his intention of creation, to show the inevitability of the tragic end under Hawthorne's pen. From these analyses, people can reach a systematic and profound understanding of the causes of the tragedy of love, and thus will grasp the connotation of the novel comprehensively and accurately.

On the Tragedy of Love in The Scarlet Letter INTRODUCTION

Nathaniel Hawthorne, the great romantic novelist of the 19th century, is one of the founders of American literature. Influenced by the times and social background, family origin and life experiences, his novels reflect a strong flavor of Puritan ideology. In his masterpiece The Scarlet Letter , Hawthorne tells a story of tragedy of love. This thesis analyzes the causes of the tragedy of love from three aspects. By analyzing the three main characters' different personalities, the thesis reveals the internal reason of the tragedy. This thesis also deals with women's status and dark society at that time, showing the influence of the environmental factors of the tragedy. In addition, it also focuses on Hawthorne's life experiences and his intention of creation, to show the inevitability of the tragic end under Hawthorne's pen. From these analyses, people can reach a systematic and profound understanding of the causes of the tragedy of love, and thus will grasp the connotation of the novel comprehensively and accurately.

Wellington 2013 – Of marriages and happy endings: A reading of Clotilde Masci’s "Vigilia nuziale

altrelettere

In "Vigilia nuziale", a 1952 play by Clotilde Masci (1918-1985), the protagonist Cristina, at almost 30 years of age, is about to marry the son of her father’s best friend – a man she barely knows. On the eve of the wedding, however, she claims first to her family and then to the police that she stole a ring from the jeweller’s. After the confession of the true thief proves her innocence, the play ends with a subdued Cristina asking her relatives for forgiveness, as the wedding preparations resume. In this article, I argue that the popular culture of the 1950s appears to have had a great influence on "Vigilia nuziale"’s major and minor characters’ expectations regarding love and marriage. Ironically, however, Masci is making clear that the “happily ever after” which the popular fiction of the early 1950s promises as part of marriage may apply to very few of its readers – and certainly not to the protagonist of this play. Through this drama, the author comments bo...

'No family, no wife, no friends, no infidelities': Wives Present and Absent in Naipaul's Autobiographical Fiction

V.S. Naipaul’s 1987 novel The Enigma of Arrival is set in the 1970s in the Wiltshire countryside where Naipaul lived with his wife for 10 years. In this novel, Naipaul has explicitly identified the narrator with his own ‘seeing eye, my feeling person’, while leaving out his personal relationships, and the narrator gives no hint of being married. In this paper I speculate on some possible structural and artistic reasons for this omission, and I read both this novel and some of Naipaul’s earlier fiction, including A House for Mr Biswas (1962), for implicit traces of his first wife and their marriage, contracted in 1955, which he explicitly excluded from this autobiographical novel.

The Commodification of the "New Man" & the Radicalization of Heroine/Hero: Austen the Writer Comes of Age in Northanger Abbey

A generation separates Dr. John Gregory’s book of conduct to young women, A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (1774), from Mary Wollstonecraft’s proto-feminist rebuttal, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Within that time, Jane Austen is twice born: first as a baby (1775), next as a writer (her Juvenilia, around 1792-93). In 1809, her seventeenth year as a writer, Austen fails to win the publication of Susan, the book that would become Northanger Abbey. The following year Thomas Egerton publishes Sense and Sensibility. In a real sense, Austen comes of age upon her eighteenth year as a professional writer just as her unlikely heroine, Catherine does at eighteen, as a married woman having weathered duplicity and the mechanations of the socio-economics of early nineteenth century women, in general, and the women of the gentry, specifically. For Austen the writer, the duplicity came in the form of Crosbie & Company’s ambivalent purchase of Susan which implied a promise of publication and the subsequent change of heart, reminiscent of Isabella Thorpe’s turns in courtship within the pages of the eventual Northanger Abbey; the mechanations of achieving book publication being akin to a dance, like the balls in Bath, insofar as dance allowed the necessary intimacies that form matches. In publishing, the match was between writer and a “New Publisher” (for NA and Persuasion, it would be John Murray instead of Egerton). In the romance, the match is the inevitable one between heroine and hero—but the embodiment of those tropes are radically different: Catherine Morland, the former infant that “no one…would have supposed her…to be an heroine” and Henry Tilney as “New Man,” an answer to Wollstonecraft’s plea for the nullification of “gothic manners” and a usurpation of “a more reasonable and affectionate mode of conduct” with regard to societal courtship.