Seductive Forms Women's Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740 [Paperback]

Historicist and feminist accounts of the rise of the novel have neglected the phenomenon of the professional woman writer in England prior to the advent of the sentimental novel in the 1740s.Seductive Formsexplores the means by which the three leading Tory women novelists of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries challenged and reworked both contemporary gender ideologies and generic convention. The seduction plot provided Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood with a vehicle for dramatizing their own appropriation of the masculine power of fiction-making. Seduction is employed in these fictions as a metaphor for both novelistic production (the seduction of the reader by the writer) and party political machination (the seduction of the public by the politician). The book also explores the debts early prose fiction owes to French seventeenth-century models of fiction-writing and argues that Behn, Manley, and Haywood succeeded in producing a distinctively English and female form for an amatory novel.

Introduction
Part I: Gender and Genre
1. The Rise of the Novel: Gender and Genre in Theories of Prose Fiction
2. Observing the Forms: Amatory Fiction and the Construction of a Female Reader
Part II: Women Writers
3. `A Devil on't, the Woman Damns the Poet': Aphra Behn's Fictions of Feminine Identity
4. `A Genius for Love': Sex as Politics in Delarivier Manley's Scandal Fiction
5. `Preparatives to Love': Fiction as Seduction in Eliza Haywood's Amatory Prose
Conclusion: The Decline of Amatory Fiction: Re(de)fining the Female Form
Bibliography
Index

In a style that is never dull, never full of jargon, Ballaster engages the reader in an exciting examination of early women's fiction. An important book. --Choice

This critically engaged and engaging book opens a new chapter in the history of Anglo-American literary historiography, advancl£+