"Public and Private "was first published in 1997. Minnesota
Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable
books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the
original University of Minnesota Press editions.
This groundbreaking work examines the emergent and fluctuating
relationship between the public and private social spheres of the
late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By assessing novels such
as Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" and Jane Austen's "Emma" through
the lens of the social theories of Jurgen Habermas and Michel
Foucault, Patricia McKee presents a fresh and highly original
contribution to literary studies.
McKee explores the themes of production and consumption as they
relate to gender and class throughout the works of many of the most
influential novels of the age including Tobias Smollett's "Humphry
Clinker," Horace Walpole's "The Castle of Otranto," "Emma,"
"Frankenstein," Anthony Trollope's "Barchester Towers," Charles
Dickens's "Little Dorrit" and "The Old Curiosity Shop," Mrs. Henry
Wood's "East Lynne," and Thomas Hardy's "The Return of the
Native."
McKee analyzes portrayals of a society in which abstract
idealism belonged to knowledgeable, productive men and the realm of
ignorance was left to emotional, consuming women and the
uneducated. She traces the various ways British literature of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries worked to reform this social
experience. Topics include Dickens's attack on the bureaucratic use
of knowledge to maintain the status quo; the function of
antiprogressive depictions of knowledge in Trollope, Shelley, and
Hardy; and Austen's characterization of the protagonist Emma as an
exception in a society that denied women's productive use of
knowledge.
Offering a sharp challenge to theorists who have charted a
linear division of public and private experience, McKee highlights
the unexpected configurations of the emergence of the public and
private spheres and the effect of knowledge distribution across
class and gender lines.
Patricia McKee is professor of English at Dartmouth College. She
is the author of "Heroic Commitment in Richardson, Eliot, and
James" (1986).
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