Property, education, and identity in late eighteenth-century fiction : the heroine of disinterest

This book recovers the importance of a major figure in eighteenth-century British fiction: the Heroine of Disinterest. Cope shows how the disinterested heroine was no stereotype but a crucial figure in modernizing identity, bringing to life the ideal of character as the product of experience and reflection rather than inheritance and lineage. Virginia H. Cope analyzes the transition to modern ideals of identity by tracking a character type, here called the Heroine of Disinterest, that dominated late eighteenth-century British fiction. Best represented in Frances Burney's 1778 Evelina, the Heroine of Disinterest is a young woman of uncertain birth but unshakeable virtue, manifested in her acts of charity and absolute imperviousness to the lure of wealth and status. Although the selfless heroine and the inheritance plot in which she figures are often dismissed as conventional, this book demonstrates that the character was central to mediating the vexed relations among property, education, and identity, unsettled by the rise of a capitalist ethos. Associating disinterest with women rescued the ancient ideal from extinction while also providing the discursive means to divide subjectivity from proprietorship, opening the way for the Romantic ideal of selfhood as the product of experience and reflection rather than inherited wealth and lineage--Résumé de l'éditeur Cover......Page 1 Contents......Page 8 Acknowledgements......Page 9 Introduction......Page 10 1 Feminizing Disinterest......Page 29 2 Burney’s Heroines of Disinterest......Page 48 3 Strategic Disavowals in A Simple Story......Page 74 4 Gothic Properties......Page 95 5 Property Recollected in Tranquility......Page 125 Conclusion: Austenian Disinterest......Page 148 Notes......Page 157 Bibliography......Page 175 C......Page 185 F......Page 186 L......Page 187 R......Page 188 W......Page 189