Publisher's Synopsis
Is there such a thing as a "woman's voice" in fiction? In the context of feminist criticism, this question is more problematic than critics once believed. Beyond asking whether certain themes, forms or styles are linked primarily to women writers, one can examine how womanhood is defined by a culture. The emerging field of feminist narratology builds on these two areas of enquiry, linking form and social construction and giving its practitioners a new set of terms with which to address how a woman tells a story.;This work applies these tools to British novels of the 18th and 19th centuries. Alison A. Case identifies a convention of "feminist narration" characterized by the exclusion of the female narrator from shaping her experience into a coherent, meaningful and authoritative story. Instead, a male narrator steps in to shape the narrative, either within the text or in a pseudoeditorial frame. Case treats Richardson's "Pamela" and "Clarissa" as foundational texts in the establishment of this literary convention and then traces its evolution through readings of novels by Smollett, Scott, Charlotte Bronte, Barrett Browning, Dickens, Collins and Stoker. In giving female narration the status of convention, Case suggests that deviations from it create a deliberate effect. She focuses primarily on texts in which the convention is challenged, reasserted or reshaped and in which female narrative authority, or lack thereof, plays a central thematic as well as formal role. These struggles over narrative control often represent larger concerns about female power and agency.
