The female libertine from Dryden to Defoe
This dissertation considers how Restoration and early eighteenth-century writers imagined the female libertine in representative comedies and fiction written from the 1670s to the 1720s. These include John Dryden's Marriage A-la-Mode (1671), George Etherege's The Man of Mode (1676), Aphra...
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| Format: | Dissertation |
| Language: | English |
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ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
01-01-2008
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| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | This dissertation considers how Restoration and early eighteenth-century writers imagined the female libertine in representative comedies and fiction written from the 1670s to the 1720s. These include John Dryden's Marriage A-la-Mode (1671), George Etherege's The Man of Mode (1676), Aphra Behn's late comedy, The Luckey Chance, or an Alderman's Bargain (1686), and novella, The History of the Nun (1689), Catharine Trotter's epistolary narrative, Olinda's Adventures (1693), and only comedy, Love at a Loss, or the Most Votes Carries It (1700), and Daniel Defoe's novel, Roxana (1724). Because Charles II's court mistresses gained prominent positions at court, they inspired onstage adaptations of female libertines by writers also interested in Epicureanism. This dissertation gives attention both to perceptions of the mistresses at Charles II's court and to Lucretius's De rerum natura, which informs the witty, rebellious female libertine figures that influenced the development of sensibility in England during the seventeenth century. The increased emphasis on morality during the eighteenth century resulted in writers featuring heroines of sensibility that reject libertinism. Defoe's Roxana provides one of the last examples of a libertine heroine, and her absence of feeling marks a notable division between the heroine of sensibility and the female libertine. |
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| ISBN: | 0549554939 9780549554936 |