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Judging The Rational And The Dead: Ann Radcliffe And Feminist Theology, Garland Beasley

Theses and Dissertations

“Judging the Rational and the Dead: Ann Radcliffe and Feminist Theology” argues Radcliffe’s first three novels, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), A Sicilian Romance (1790), and The Romance of the Forest (1791), show a progression of feminist theology informed by the late eighteenth-century British religious movement of Rational Dissent. The thesis attempts to complicate and extend Radcliffe scholarship by moving away from fractured critical discourses and into more cohesive readings of Radcliffe that include feminist and theological interpretations of her work. Of particular interest to the project are Radcliffe’s views on the circumscribed nature of women’s existence within …