Unnatural Affections: Women and Fiction in the Later 18th Century - Softcover

Haggerty, George E.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0253211832 ISBN 13: 9780253211835

Publisher: Indiana University Press, 1998

Synopsis

"...compelling...One draws from Haggerty's very deft readings a strong understanding of the ways in which women writers worked to resist, with greater and lesser success, the increasing demand that gender relations be normalized by imagining ever more possibilities for deviance." -Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature George Haggerty examines the "unnatural" affections that abound in 18th-century novels. Their portrayal offered a complex understanding of the role of gender and the articulation of female desire during the age in which women novel writers came into their own. The novelists offered romantic friends, effeminized male partners, maimed heroines, paternal obsession, and lesbian couples-relations that defied cultural taboos of the time

About this title

Synopsis:

George Haggerty examines the 'unnatural' affections that defy cultural taboos and challenge what are seen as natural boundaries to desire. Such affections abound in eighteenth century novels offering a complex understanding of the role of gender and the articulation of female desire during the age in which women came into their own as novel writers. On the one hand defying cultural dictates of domestic and familial ideology, and on the other eroticising relations that the family would naturalise - such as sister, brother, father, and mother - the women novelists have accomplished more than literary history has ever allowed them. What is queer about these works is their refusal to conform to heteronormative expectation as well as their sheer inventiveness of imagined alternatives. The novelists offer romantic friends, effeminized male partners, devoted sisterly affection, mother-daughter bonds, maimed and disfigured heroines, bleeding heroes, abject paternal obsession, and lesbian couples. For the first time, women were able to take a literary form and invest it with some of their own most deeply felt concerns.

About the Author:

GEORGE E. HAGGERTY is Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of Gothic Fiction/Gothic Form, and co-editor of Professions of Desire and essays on the sexuality and gender in works of the later eighteenth century.

About this edition

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0253211832
• ISBN 13: 9780253211835
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224