Women's Lives and the 18th-Century English Novel.

The entries in this year's bibliography cover a wide range of disciplines and, in many cases, address one of the following concerns. First, there is a tendency for those who view almost everything as a potential source of life-writing to assert that to some extent all discourse is autobiographical. Secondly, some might go as far as to say that the self of the writer is as much a construction as the very discourse that is being constructed. And lastly, "biografying" may, in fact, be as much an autoreflexive act as the construction of the Self is an act of self-biography. All these assumptions bode well for the future since we may be more capable of taking hold and shaping the planet according to our own image than ever before.

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Madness and Matrimony in Frances Burney’s Cecilia

Jordan¹

2015

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Frances Burney’s novel Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress (1782) provides a crucial counter to studies of the marriage plot. Burney’s novel, instead of accepting marriage as a convenient solution to the ills of a decadent, late eighteenth-century society, represents marriage as both mollifying and contributing to the oppression of women in a patriarchal society. Thus, Cecilia ’s representation of matrimony both subverts and preserves the ideological dominance of marital unions, demonstrating that the ultimate crisis therein is a crisis over women’s self-possession and self-definition.

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Women's Lives and the 18th-Century English Novel.

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Bibliography of Works about Life-Writing for the Early '90s

Madness and Matrimony in Frances Burney’s Cecilia

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