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Literary Criticism English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh

Private Interests

Women, Portraiture, and the Visual Culture of the English Novel, 1709-1791

by (author) Alison Conway

Publisher
University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division
Initial publish date
Nov 2019
Category
English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Women Authors
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781487525446
    Publish Date
    Nov 2019
    List Price
    $39.95
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9780802035264
    Publish Date
    Oct 2001
    List Price
    $107.00
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781442678767
    Publish Date
    Sep 2001
    List Price
    $105.00

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Description

This ambitious interdisciplinary study undertakes a new definition of the eighteenth-century novel's investment in vision and visual culture, tracing the relationship between the development of the novel and that of the equally contentious genre of the portrait, particularly as represented in the novel itself. Working with the novels of Richardson, Fielding, Haywood, Manley, Sterne, Wollstonecraft and Inchbald, and the portraits of Reynolds, Gainsborough, Highmore, Hudson, Hogarth, and others, Private Interests points to the intimate connections between the literary works and the paintings. Arguing that the novel's representation of the portrait sustains a tension between competing definitions of private interests, Conway shows how private interests are figured as simultaneously decorous and illicit in the novel, with the portrait at once an instrument of propriety and of scandal. Examining women's roles as both authors of and characters in the novel and the novel's encounters with the portrait, the author provides a new definition of private interests, one which highlights the development of women's agency as both spectacles and spectators.

About the author

Alison Conway (KELOWNA, BC) is Associate Dean of Research, Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. She is the author of Private Interests: Women, Portraiture, and the Visual Culture of the English Novel, 1709-1791 and The Protestant Whore: Courtesan Narrative and Religious Controversy in England, 1680-1750.

Alison Conway's profile page

Awards

  • Winner, Raymond Klibansky Prize, Canadian Foundation for the Humanities & Social Sciences