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 2009 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.
• A full-length study of the genre of the seduction narrative in the later eighteenth century • Original research into unknown seduction narratives and their printing histories • New reading of seduction narratives and their representation of gender roles
Contents
Introduction; 1. Knowing love: the epistemology of Clarissa; 2. The whore's love or the Magdalen's seduction; 3. After knowledge: married heroines and seduction; 4. Seduction in street literature; 5. Melodramatic seduction: 1790s fiction and the excess of the real; Bibliography.
Review
Review of the hardback: 'All in all, the examination of seduction narratives turns out to be more productive in filling in the subtleties of women's history than one might have thought before reading this well-argued book.' Ruth Perry, Times Literary Supplement
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