In the eighteenth century, critics of capitalism denounced the growth of luxury and effeminacy; supporters applauded the increase of refinement and the improved status of women. This pioneering study explores the way the association of commerce and femininity permeated cultural production. It looks at the first use of a female author as an icon of modernity in the Athenian Mercury, and reappraises works by Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Mandeville, Defoe, Pope and Elizabeth Carter. Samuel Richardson's novels represent the culmination of the English debate, while contemporary essays by David Hume move towards a fully-fledged enlightenment theory of feminization.
Author(s): E. J. Clery
Series: Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print
Edition: 1st
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2004
Language: English
Pages: 256
Cover......Page 1
Contents......Page 8
List of Illustrations......Page 10
Acknowledgements......Page 11
Abbreviations......Page 12
Introduction......Page 14
1 Sexual Alchemy in the Coffee-House......Page 26
'New Things'......Page 39
A Sexual Dialectic......Page 41
Elizabeth Singer Rowe and 'The Double Courtship'......Page 45
The Legacy of the Athenian Mercury......Page 55
The fate of John Dunton, pioneer feminizer......Page 59
The Progessivist Bubble Bursts......Page 64
The Role of the Passions......Page 70
False Feminists and Moral Crisis in Mandeville and Defoe......Page 76
A Vignette......Page 87
A Female Author in the 1730s......Page 88
Pope and the Woman Writer......Page 92
Elizabeth Carter, the Gentleman's Magazine and the Challenge to Pope......Page 98
Richardson's Historical Fictions......Page 108
The Opposition of the Sexes in Clarissa......Page 112
The Rake......Page 117
The 'Present Age'......Page 120
The Trial of Woman......Page 126
The Trial of Man......Page 130
The Apotheosis of Clarissa and the Redemption of Man......Page 132
Clarissa as a Progressivist Narrative......Page 138
The Closet as Laboratory of the Soul......Page 145
Elizabeth Carter, Catherine Talbot and the Richardson Effect......Page 151
Women's Writing at the Crossroads: 1750......Page 161
Sir Charles Grandison as Object of Desire......Page 167
Inventories of Literary Women......Page 175
Coda: From Discourse to a Theory of Feminization in the Essays of David Hume......Page 184
Notes......Page 192
Bibliography......Page 228
C......Page 240
D......Page 241
G......Page 242
M......Page 243
P......Page 244
S......Page 245
W......Page 246
Y......Page 247
