Gender Politics in Late Seventeenth-Century Fiction
- Tomás Monterrey
- Sonia Villegas-López
- María José Coperías-Aguilar
- Lourdes López Ropero (coord.)
- Sara Prieto García-Cañedo (coord.)
- José Antonio Sánchez Fajardo (coord.)
Publisher: Universidad de Alicante / Universitat d'Alacant
ISBN: 978-84-1302-079-2
Year of publication: 2020
Pages: 275-279
Congress: Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos. Congreso (43. 2020. Valencia)
Type: Conference paper
Abstract
In its origins, the novel was taken as sub-literature, mainly because it was seen as a feminised form. From the early 1660s, the prose works of relevant French female romance writers were translated into English and consumed by an audience eager to read about love and gallantry. The novel provided women authors with new possibilities for imitation, appropriation and experimentation, and many of them published fiction in their own name, like Cavendish, Behn, Manley, Trotter and Pix. We also approach the gender question broadly, in order to explain the origins and popularity of the novel by referring to the conditions of the literary market and women’s roles as writers, characters, narrators and readers. We are interested in practices like crossdressing and masquerade to help us analyse gender-genre intersections in stories about love, exoticism and sexual violence, present in the heroic romance, the secret history and epistolary fiction