Inanimate fiction: circulating stories in object narratives

Flint, Christopher

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511996344.005

The Appearance of Print in Eighteenth-Century Fiction 2011

DOI: 10.1017/cbo9780511996344.005

|View full text |Cite

Inanimate fiction: circulating stories in object narratives

Christopher Flint¹

Help me understand this report

Search citation statements

Order By: Relevance

Paper Sections

Select...

Citation Types

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Year Published

2014

Publication Types

Select...

Article1

Relationship

Self Cite0

Independent1

Authors

Journals

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…For Christopher Flint, the very autonomy of their narrators is a sign of the author's longing for ownership of his or her creations. 7 Theorists of the novel have celebrated it-narratives as innovative experiments in the principles of the bildungsroman, reading their focus on the life of the abused and significant protagonist as predictive of the attention given to ordinary human characters in the nineteenth century. 8 To give a last example, Bonnie Blackwell argues that it-narratives are mainly about women's bodies.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Gender and Materiality on the Eighteenth-Century Page

Lupton¹

2014

sel

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Pen and paper have long been conceptualized as the male and female of writing. Listed by Sigmund Freud alongside pipes and umbrellas as phallic symbols, pens are taken up by poets as figures of literary paternity and held awkwardly in the imagination of women who approach the domain of authorship as outsiders. 1 Studied in the spirit of twentieth-century theory, writing manuals become clues to the way in which the logocentric project of writing fuses together the male body and pen, leaving no trace of the word's material production behind. 2 Paper, on the other hand, is associated with perfect blankness-its whiteness lauded as the space on which all can be written; its surface surveyed by female authors as an endless landscape on which their writing takes no other shape but that of scribbles. 3 "This model of the pen-penis writing on the virgin page participates," Susan Gubar argues, "in a long tradition identifying the author as a male who is primary and the female as his passive creation." 4 It is an "omnipresent metaphor," confirms Friedrich A. Kittler, that has "equated women with the white sheet of nature or virginity onto which a very male stylus could then inscribe the glory of its authorship." 5 This essay discusses a cluster of short, eighteenth-century tales that rewrite this list of imagined alliances between the tools of writing and the bodies of the men and women who use them. The narratives on which I focus are told from the perspectives of quills, paper, and printed or handwritten pages-narrators who are all figured quite strongly as female. While it-narratives cast pens as vulnerable, feathery females exploited in the production of Christina Lupton is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick. She is working on a project exploring the way print reading shapes the experience of time in the eighteenth century.

show abstract

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Gender and Materiality on the Eighteenth-Century Page

Lupton¹

2014

sel

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.

Contact Info

hi@scite.ai

10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614

Henderson, NV 89052, USA

Blog Terms and Conditions API Terms Privacy Policy Contact Cookie Preferences Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information

Made with 💙 for researchers

Part of the Research Solutions Family.

Inanimate fiction: circulating stories in object narratives

Cited by 1 publication

References 0 publications

Gender and Materiality on the Eighteenth-Century Page

Gender and Materiality on the Eighteenth-Century Page

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About