Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1920: 31 (Studies on the History of Society and Culture) - Hardcover

Gallagher, University Catherine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520085108 ISBN 13: 9780520085107

Publisher: University of California Press, 1994

Synopsis

Exploring the careers of five influential women writers of the Restoration and eighteenth century, Catherine Gallagher reveals the connections between the increasing prestige of female authorship, the economy of credit and debt, and the rise of the novel. The "nobodies" of her title are not ignored, silenced, or anonymous women. Instead, they are literal nobodies: the abstractions of authorial personae, printed books, intellectual property rights, literary reputations, debts and obligations, and fictional characters. These are the exchangeable tokens of modern authorship that lent new cultural power to the increasing number of women writers through the eighteenth century.Women writers, Gallagher discovers, invented and popularized numerous ingenious similarities between their gender and their occupation. The terms "woman," "author," "marketplace," and "fiction" come to define each other reciprocally. Gallagher analyzes the provocative plays of Aphra Behn, the scandalous court chronicles of Delarivier Manley, the properly fictional nobodies of Charlotte Lennox and Frances Burney, and finally Maria Edgeworth's attempts in the late eighteenth century to reform the unruly genre of the novel.

About this title

Review

very interesting book ... In this entertaining and thoughtful book, the studies of Burney and Edgeworth are particularly good ... she is wonderfully shrewd and alert. Other readers of novels can learn from her. ( The Times Literary Supplement)

Intricate and carefully evolved readings of a number of now 'key' texts in the study of eighteenth-century fiction form the main body of the text ... More significant, perhaps, than the seriousness and complexity with which these texts are treated is the contribution the book makes overall to both feminist literary history and the study of the novel, providing one of the most convincing arguments yet for the study of the novel, providing one of the most convincing arguments yet for the necessity for these kinds of analysis to be conducted in tandem. ( Ros Ballaster, Mansfield College, Oxford, Review of English Studies, Vol. XLVIII, No. 189, feb '97)

an important, playful and stimulating book ... Gallagher's study takes nothing for granted conceptually ( Angela Keane, University of Salford, British Journal for Eighteenth- Century Studies, vol. 20, pt. 1, Spring 1997)

Catherine Gallagher uses her ambiguous title to make a very clear methodological statement ... Nobody's Story is a story about the rise of the novel. It is a major contribution to feminism;s longstanding project to rewrite Ian Watt's seminal version of that story. ( Women: A Cultural Review, Vol. 8, No. 1, '97)

About this edition

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0520085108
• ISBN 13: 9780520085107
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 339