Women and Gift Exchange in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: by Linda Zionkowski PDF
By Linda Zionkowski
This booklet analyzes why the main influential novelists of the lengthy eighteenth century based their narratives at the conception and perform of reward alternate. all through this era, primary shifts in monetary theories concerning the resources of person and nationwide wealth in addition to adjustments within the practices of non-public and institutional charity profoundly altered cultural understandings of the gift's reason, objective, and serve as. Drawing on fabrics reminiscent of sermons, behavior books, works of political philosophy, and tracts on social reform, Zionkowski demanding situations the concept that capitalist discourse was once the dominant impact at the improvement of prose fiction. in its place, by means of moving consciousness to the present procedure because it used to be imagined and enacted within the youth of the radical, the amount bargains an leading edge realizing of the way the financial system of legal responsibility formed writers' portrayals of sophistication and gender id, estate, and neighborhood. via theoretically-informed readings of Richardson's Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison, Burney's Cecilia and The Wanderer, and Austen's Mansfield Park and Emma, the e-book foregrounds the problems of donation, reciprocity, indebtedness, and gratitude because it investigates the conflicts among the marketplace and ethical economies and analyzes women's place on the heart of those conflicts. As this examine finds, the exchanges that eighteenth-century fiction prescribed for girls be certain the continued strength and value of present transactions in the course of an more and more advertisement tradition. the amount can be crucial studying for students of the eighteenth-century novel, fiscal literary feedback, ladies and gender stories, and e-book background.