AUC PHILOLOGICA
AUC PHILOLOGICA

AUC Philologica (Acta Universitatis Carolinae Philologica) is an academic journal published by Charles University. It publishes scholarly articles in a large number of disciplines (English, German, Greek and Latin, Oriental, Romance and Slavonic studies, as well as in phonetics and translation studies), both on linguistic and on literary and cultural topics. Apart from articles it publishes reviews of new academic books or special issues of academic journals.

The journal is indexed in CEEOL, DOAJ, EBSCO, and ERIH PLUS.

AUC PHILOLOGICA, Vol 2016 No 1 (2016), 7–21

Em/bedded Narratives: Marriage, Seduction and Adultery in the Eighteenth-Century English novel

Soňa Nováková

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14712/24646830.2016.24
published online: 15. 06. 2016

abstract

The article deals with embedded stories of seduction in the context of eighteenth-century novels. Although literary history has focused mainly on the novel of courtship, marital and family life has actually had a very important place in literature throughout the century. Within novels about the life of a marriage the tales of chaste wives repeatedly run in narrative conjunction with embedded tales of fallen women. These do not function merely as cautionary contrasts but participate in the process of consolidating the discourse of marriage and love in the period of sensibility. The principal object of analysis is the novel of Frances Sheridan (1724–1766) The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761) where embedded tales of seduction problematise traditional concepts of female and conjugal morality. The article relies on recent approaches to the history of the family and on the methods of feminist narratology. Vložené příběhy: Manželství, svádění a cizoložství v anglickém románu 18. století Článek se zabývá literárním ztvárněním příběhů svedených žen v kontextu románů o manželství (novel of marriage) z 18. století. Ačkoliv stávající literární historie zkoumá zejména romány, které se věnují předmanželskému dvoření (novel of courtship), manželský a rodinný život zaujímá důležité místo v literatuře celého 18. století. Osudy věrných manželek probíhají v zajímavé narativní konjunkci s vloženými příběhy svedených žen, které nefungují pouze jako varovné kontrasty, ale participují na procesu konsolidace diskurzu manželství a lásky v období sentimentalismu. Páteřním textem pro analýzu je román spisovatelky Frances Sheridan (1724–1766) Příběh Sidney Bidulph (The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph, 1761), kde vložené epizody svedení problematizují tradiční pojetí ženské a manželské morálky. Článek za tímto účelem využívá nálezy historiografie rodiny a postupy feministické naratologie.

keywords: Frances Sheridan; novel of marriage; women novelists; eighteenth-century English novel; feminist narratology; love in literature; history of family

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230 x 157 mm
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print price: 150 czk
ISSN: 0567-8269
E-ISSN: 2464-6830

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