Desire And Domestic Fiction by Nancy Armstrong
A Political History of the Novel
Tracing the emergence of the English novel in the eighteenth century, the work argues that domestic fiction was central to the formation of modern subjectivity and a gendered social order. It shows how narratives of courtship, seduction, and household life trained readers in ideals of property, propriety, and self-control, converting private desire into political and economic normativity. By analyzing form and plot—especially the figure of the vulnerable heroine and the rhetoric of interiority—it demonstrates how novels functioned as pedagogical technologies that stabilized bourgeois relations between public law and private feeling. The result is a political history of the novel that links literary technique to social power, gender relations, and the consolidation of modern capitalism.
- Published
- 1987
- Nationality
- American
- Length
- Unknown
- Pages
- Unknown
- Original Language
- English
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