(Download) "Brian Corman. Women Novelists Before Jane Austen: The Critics and Their Canons" by English Studies in Canada # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Brian Corman. Women Novelists Before Jane Austen: The Critics and Their Canons
- Author : English Studies in Canada
- Release Date : January 01, 2008
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 57 KB
Description
Brian Corman. Women Novelists before Jane Austen: The Critics and their Canons. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2008. 326 pp. $65. "[T]he majority of eighteenth-century novels were actually written by women, but this had long remained a purely quantitative assertion of dominance," Ian Watts's unsubstantiated "throw-away line" in The Rise of the Novel (1957), motivated Dale Spender's hypothesis that early women novelists were deliberately excluded from literary canons based only on their sex. Brian Corman, who tells us "[does] not believe in 'only' explanations for interesting problems in literary history" (4), was spurred to ask questions about canon making and the story of the development of the novel. The result is a "history of histories" of the novel: a survey of two hundred years of responses to the novel, with a particular emphasis on discovering how women novelists came to be excluded. Corman's chronological presentation of histories and the emergence of literary canons is an accessible, informative, and sometimes humorous study.