Women, the Novel, and Natural Philosophy, 1660–1727

Thanking the many people who have made this book possible is one of the great pleasures of such a project. It gives me considerable sympathy for my authors, who in their different ways rejected the notion of isolated genius and recognized that the interaction between individual and context is necessary to creation. "Women, the Novel, and Natural Philosophy, 1660-1727" shows how early women novelists drew on debates about the self generated by the 'scientific' revolution to establish the novel as a genre and literary omniscience as a point of view. These writers such as Aphra Behn, Jane Barker, Eliza Haywood, and Mary Davys used, tested, explored, accepted, and rejected ideas about the self in their works to represent the act of knowing and what it means to be a knowing self. Karen Bloom Gevirtz agues that as they did so, they developed structures for representing authoritative knowing that contributed to the development of the novel as a genre, and to literary omniscience as a point of view This book shows how early women novelists from Aphra Behn to Mary Davys drew on debates about the self generated by the 'scientific' revolution to establish the novel as a genre. Fascinated by the problematic idea of a unified self underpinning modes of thinking, female novelists innovated narrative structures to interrogate this idea. Front Matter....Pages i-x Introduction....Pages 1-14 Notions of the Self....Pages 15-34 An Ingenious Romance: The Stable Self....Pages 35-70 The Fly’s Eye: The Composite Self....Pages 71-100 The Detached Observer....Pages 101-126 The Moral Observer....Pages 127-165 Conclusion....Pages 167-171 Back Matter....Pages 173-247