Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > 16th to 18th centuries
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Women and Gift Exchange in Eighteenth-Century Fiction - Richardson, Burney, Austen (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R4,175
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Women and Gift Exchange in Eighteenth-Century Fiction - Richardson, Burney, Austen (Hardcover)
Series: Routledge Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature
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This book analyzes why the most influential novelists of the long
eighteenth century centered their narratives on the theory and
practice of gift exchange. Throughout this period, fundamental
shifts in economic theories regarding the sources of individual and
national wealth along with transformations in the practices of
personal and institutional charity profoundly altered cultural
understandings of the gift's rationale, purpose, and function.
Drawing on materials such as sermons, conduct books, works of
political philosophy, and tracts on social reform, Zionkowski
challenges the idea that capitalist discourse was the dominant
influence on the development of prose fiction. Instead, by shifting
attention to the gift system as it was imagined and enacted in the
formative years of the novel, the volume offers an innovative
understanding of how the economy of obligation shaped writers'
portrayals of class and gender identity, property, and community.
Through 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 book foregrounds the issues
of donation, reciprocity, indebtedness, and gratitude as it
investigates the conflicts between the market and moral economies
and analyzes women's position at the center of these conflicts. As
this study reveals, the exchanges that eighteenth-century fiction
prescribed for women confirm the continuing power and importance of
gift transactions in the midst of an increasingly commercial
culture. The volume will be essential reading for scholars of the
eighteenth-century novel, economic literary criticism, women and
gender studies, and book history.
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