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English Language and Literature Commons

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Cleveland State University

Theses/Dissertations

2015

Secret history

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

Making Waves: Bacon, Manley, And The Shifting Rhetorics Of Opulent At(A)Lantis, Alex Cahill Nielsen Jan 2015

Making Waves: Bacon, Manley, And The Shifting Rhetorics Of Opulent At(A)Lantis, Alex Cahill Nielsen

ETD Archive

In the modern critical environment, there has been a renewed interest in the role that proto-feminist and feminist satires have played in the development of cultural commentary and the modern novel. Lesser-studied works have seen several new approaches applied by critics such as Rachel Carnell, Rebecca Bullard, and Ruth Herman, who have focused on the role of the genre of "secret history" in the popular growth of the novel as a form for political dissent. Secret history, which can offer revelatory glimpses into the contemporary scandals and governance of the female authors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is a …


Sexualizing The Body Politic: Narrative The Female Body And The Gender Divide In Secret History, Eileen A. Horansky Jan 2015

Sexualizing The Body Politic: Narrative The Female Body And The Gender Divide In Secret History, Eileen A. Horansky

ETD Archive

Recent studies of eighteenth-century women writers have focused on the role of women as developers and proponents of the secret history. The secret history, recently defined by scholars such as Rebecca Bullard, Melinda Alliker Rabb, Ros Ballaster, Marta Kvande, and Rachel Carnell, among others, occupies space within several genres, including political satire and historiography. The genre's secretive nature and reliance on gossip and anecdotal evidence creates a new space for women writers that allows them to enter political discourse and offer a distinctly gendered social commentary. As public became private and private became secret, secret historians sought to expose the …