Overview

During the later eighteenth century, changes in the meaning and status of literature left popular sentimental novels stranded on the margins of literary history. While critics no longer dismiss or ignore these works, recent reassessments have emphasized their interventions in various political and cultural debates rather than their literary significance. Sentimental Memorials, by contrast, argues that sentimental novels gave the women who wrote them a means of clarifying, protesting, and finally memorializing the historical conditions under which they wrote. As women writers successfully navigated the professional marketplace but struggled to position their works among more lasting literary monuments, their novels reflect on what the elevation of literature would mean for women's literary reputations. Drawing together the history of the novel, women's literary history, and book history, Melissa Sodeman revisits the critical frameworks through which we have understood the history of literature. Novels by Sophia Lee, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Robinson, she argues, offer ways of rethinking some of the signal literary developments of this period, from emerging notions of genius and originality to the rise of an English canon. And in Sodeman's analysis, novels long seen as insufficiently literary acquire formal and self-historicizing importance.

Full Product Details

9780804791328

Table of Contents

Reviews

Drawing together newly unearthed materials and fresh insights on literary history, British women's writings, sentimental fiction, and the history of the book, Sodeman's study compels us to grasp not only oft-misunderstood late eighteenth-century popular literature but also to better apprehend what came before and after it. This is a highly original book, as beautifully written as it is persuasively argued. --Devoney Looser, Arizona State University

Author Information

Melissa Sodeman is Associate Professor of English at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available