Title: Mary Hays and the Didactic Novel in the 1790s
Abstract: Mary Hays is best known in literary history as a radical or revolutionary author of the turbulent 1790s, a follower of Mary Wollstonecraft and her band of 'unsex'd females',1 in the words of Richard Polwhele. Gary Kelly includes Hays in the group of radical 'English Jacobins' of the 1790s, whom he describes as 'intellectuals and miscellaneous writers of liberal social views … who, inspired by revolution abroad and political protest in Britain, gave a much sharper edge to ction' by uniting philosophical theory with tropes borrowed from popular literary genres, such as the Gothic novel, the domestic romance and the novel of sensibility.2 Hays's contributions to feminist thought during this period and, more specically, her use of ction as a vehicle for political reform, have been explored by many scholars in the eld of women's writing of the late eighteenth century, establishing her as a central force in the deployment of the popular novel as a medium to 'represent, indeed, mold people's social and historical awareness, and hence their social behavior'.3 Recent scholarship on Hays, largely focusing on her two novels – Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) and The Victim of Prejudice (1799) – has continued to emphasize her efforts to further the cause of women by arguing for her particular kind of 'scientically-grounded materialist' feminism, her desire to go against the prevailing ideologies which limited the education of women and against those which linked female virtue mainly with chastity.4
Publication Year: 2016
Publication Date: 2016-11-03
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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