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Selected Works

Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Women and the Novel

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Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in History

Women, The Novel, And Natural Philosophy, 1660-1727, Karen Gevirtz Mar 2014

Women, The Novel, And Natural Philosophy, 1660-1727, Karen Gevirtz

Karen Bloom Gevirtz

Women, the Novel, and Natural Philosophy, 1660-1727 shows how early women novelists drew on debates about the self generated by the 'scientific' revolution to establish the novel as a genre and literary omniscience as a point of view. These writers such as Aphra Behn, Jane Barker, Eliza Haywood, and Mary Davys used, tested, explored, accepted, and rejected ideas about the self in their works to represent the act of knowing and what it means to be a knowing self. Karen Bloom Gevirtz agues that as they did so, they developed structures for representing authoritative knowing that contributed to the development …


Life After Death: Widows And The English Novel, Defoe To Austen, Karen Gevirtz Dec 2004

Life After Death: Widows And The English Novel, Defoe To Austen, Karen Gevirtz

Karen Bloom Gevirtz

This monograph argues that images of the widow in the early novel served to express, explore, and construct concepts of appropriate female activity in emerging capitalism during the eighteenth century in England. Drawing on novels published between 1719 and 1818, this study investigates how different classes of widows (affluent, working class, impoverished, and criminal) functioned to challenge and affirm emerging economic values. A concluding chapter on widows in Jane Austen's work shows how changing notions of appropriate female economic activity had settled by the establishment of both the capitalist economy and the novel in the early nineteenth century.


My Worldy Goods Do Thee Endow: Widowhood, Economic Conservatism, And The Mid- And Late Eighteenth-Century Novel, Karen Gevirtz Dec 2002

My Worldy Goods Do Thee Endow: Widowhood, Economic Conservatism, And The Mid- And Late Eighteenth-Century Novel, Karen Gevirtz

Karen Bloom Gevirtz

No abstract provided.