Natural masques : gender and identity in Fielding's plays and novels
Examining Henry Fielding's sustained, often ambivalent engagement with questions of gender, Natural Masques breaks with old critical commonplaces that contrast Fielding's "masculinity" with Samuel Richardson's "feminine" sensibilities. It argues that a preoccupation with the tenuousness of gendered identity appears throughout Fielding's writings, and that Fielding shared that preoccupation with his contemporaries. It therefore offers an argument about Fielding's period as well as about his major works, which are analyzed in connection with a variety of related texts - from satires on the castrati to educational treatises, Whig propaganda, and debates in political theory. Approaching gender as a complex system of relations, Campbell investigates Fielding's treatments of masculine and feminine identities across the arenas of eighteenth-century political, social, and literary conflict and change
Print Book, English, 1995
Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif., 1995
Criticism, interpretation, etc
xii, 324 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm
9780804723916, 9780804725200, 0804723915, 0804725209
30915861
pt. I. Fielding's Plays. 1. "When Men Women Turn": The Drama of Gender Reversals
pt. II. 'Joseph Andrews'. 2. The Meaning of a Male Pamela: Genre and Gender. 3. "The Natural Amphitheatre": Dramatic Satire, the Novel, and Milton's Christian Epic. 4. "The Exact Picture of His Mother": Misrecognitions, Mortal Loss, and Joseph's Promise of Reunion
pt. III. 'Tom Jones' and 'The Jacobite's Journal'. 5. Male Pretenders and Female Rebels: Whig Responses to the '45. 6. Tom Jones, Jacobitism, and Gender: History and Fiction at the Ghosting Hour. 7. "The Same Birchen Argument": Flogging, Satire, and the Jacobite's Ass
pt. IV. 'Amelia'. 8. "If This Was Real": Female Heroism in Amelia
Epilogue: Death, Witches, and Bitches in the Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon