Literary Criticism English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
Private Interests
Women, Portraiture, and the Visual Culture of the English Novel, 1709-1791
- Publisher
- University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division
- Initial publish date
- Nov 2019
- Category
- English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Women Authors
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781487525446
- Publish Date
- Nov 2019
- List Price
- $39.95
-
Hardback
- ISBN
- 9780802035264
- Publish Date
- Oct 2001
- List Price
- $107.00
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9781442678767
- Publish Date
- Sep 2001
- List Price
- $105.00
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Description
This ambitious interdisciplinary study undertakes a new definition of the eighteenth-century novel's investment in vision and visual culture, tracing the relationship between the development of the novel and that of the equally contentious genre of the portrait, particularly as represented in the novel itself. Working with the novels of Richardson, Fielding, Haywood, Manley, Sterne, Wollstonecraft and Inchbald, and the portraits of Reynolds, Gainsborough, Highmore, Hudson, Hogarth, and others, Private Interests points to the intimate connections between the literary works and the paintings. Arguing that the novel's representation of the portrait sustains a tension between competing definitions of private interests, Conway shows how private interests are figured as simultaneously decorous and illicit in the novel, with the portrait at once an instrument of propriety and of scandal. Examining women's roles as both authors of and characters in the novel and the novel's encounters with the portrait, the author provides a new definition of private interests, one which highlights the development of women's agency as both spectacles and spectators.
About the author
Alison Conway (KELOWNA, BC) is Associate Dean of Research, Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. She is the author of Private Interests: Women, Portraiture, and the Visual Culture of the English Novel, 1709-1791 and The Protestant Whore: Courtesan Narrative and Religious Controversy in England, 1680-1750.
Awards
- Winner, Raymond Klibansky Prize, Canadian Foundation for the Humanities & Social Sciences
Other titles by
Sacred Engagements
Interfaith Marriage, Religious Toleration, and the British Novel, 1750-1820
The Protestant Whore
Courtesan Narrative and Religious Controversy in England, 1680-1750
Imagining Religious Toleration
A Literary History of an Idea, 1600-1830
Mind, Body, Motion, Matter
Eighteenth-Century British and French Literary Perspectives