Law, Seduction, and the Sentimental Heroine: The Case of Amelia Norman

Hibbard, Andrea

doi:10.1215/00029831-2006-005

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The Seduction Narrative in Britain, 1747–1800

Binhammer

2009

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Eighteenth-century literature displays a fascination with the seduction of a virtuous young heroine, most famously illustrated by Samuel Richardson's Clarissa and repeated in 1790s radical women's novels, in the many memoirs by fictional or real penitent prostitutes, and in street print. Across fiction, ballads, essays and miscellanies, stories were told of women's mistaken belief in their lovers' vows. In this book Katherine Binhammer surveys seduction narratives from the late eighteenth century within the context of the new ideal of marriage-for-love and shows how these tales tell varying stories of women's emotional and sexual lives. Drawing on new historicism, feminism, and narrative theory, Binhammer argues that the seduction narrative allowed writers to explore different fates for the heroine than the domesticity that became the dominant form in later literature. This study will appeal to scholars of eighteenth-century literature, social and cultural history, and women's and gender studies.

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The Seduction Narrative in Britain, 1747–1800

Binhammer

2009

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Risk and Feminist Utopia: Radicalizing the Future

Cortiel¹

2018

American J Econ Sociol

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Risk has taken over the world as the major way of conceptualizing the future as bleak, if one follows Ulrich Beck’s claim in World at Risk (2007). However, there is also a distinctly utopian strand in American risk discourse, one that has, from the outset, been linked to feminist perspectives. Indeed, when risk entered American culture in the 19th century, immediately women’s rights philosophy began to draw on futures shaped by risk, establishing self‐ownership and agency in a context that denied such freedom to women and non‐white men. This article explores connections between risk, futurity, agency, and selfhood as expressed in feminist thought, drawing a line between Margaret Fuller’s political essay Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), Joanna Russ’s science fiction novel The Female Man (1975), and Mary Daly’s radical feminist manifesto Quintessence: Realizing the Archaic Future (1998). The aim is not to develop a narrative of development but to see how risk has become useful in shaping distinctly feminist visions of the future. More specifically, I would like to see how risk‐taking has enabled feminist social dreaming. It is precisely this groundedness in risk that allows feminist utopian visions to remain productive in popular culture beyond feminist discourse. When, for example, the movie Alien (1979, dir. Ridley Scott) introduced a female protagonist to a science fiction/horror action plot, it drew on feminist utopian narrative patterns grounded in risk and risk‐taking. Feminist utopian visions as well as their continuations in popular culture thus bring out the subversive potential of risk for feminist theory and practice.

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Law, Seduction, and the Sentimental Heroine: The Case of Amelia Norman

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

The Seduction Narrative in Britain, 1747–1800

The Seduction Narrative in Britain, 1747–1800

Risk and Feminist Utopia: Radicalizing the Future

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