Katherine Binhammer

The Failure of Trade's Empire in The History of Emily Montague

The contingencies of applying free trade imperialism to an impoverished Canada in the 1760s force the characters in Frances Brookes The History of Emily Montague to abandon the sentimental colonial project, retreating to England to establish their domestic Utopia. Other critics have read Emily Montagues relation to the colonial project as ambiguous; I agree but relate these ambiguities not to the novels gender or colonial practices, but to its economic ideology of global laissez-faire capitalism. Brookes novel tries to narrate a plot of infinite wealth accumulation, but Canadas particular political and economic problems will not abide. The novel ends up laying bare the contradictions at the heart of this emerging liberal economic theory.

The Whore's Love

by the time the Magdalen Hospital for penitent prostitutes opened in Goodman’s Fields on 10 August 1758, the sentimental portrait of the prostitute had taken shape in British culture: a prostitute painted in these terms was a seduced victim forced to sell her body for bread and not a sexual agent who whored for sexual pleasure.1 Her sprightlier sister, the non-penitent prostitute and lover of luxury, remained in circulation throughout the period (for example, in the scandalous memoirs of Maria Brown and Ann Sheldon), but most scholars agree that the second half of the eighteenth century witnesses the emer gence of the prostitute as primarily an economic victim, not a sexual predator.2

The Political Novel and the Seduction Plot: Thomas Holcroft's Anna St. Ives

Spurred by the July 1989 bicentenary of the French Revolution, critics of English literature have turned in large numbers to the study of fiction from the 1790s.1 The genealogy of the recent critical attention to 1790s fiction can be traced, in part, to our current 1990s interest in the way political meaning functions in the literary text. The impact of new historicism and cultural studies on literary criticism has led scholars to reconsider the interconnection between literature and politics, and the 1790s provide fertile ground for this work. The explicitly feminist novels ofMary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, and Charlotte Smith, for example, seem pregnant with material for those of us engaged in studying the dissemination of political and gender ideologies through literature.2 Why is it, then, that

The Story within the Story of Sentimental Fiction

Why are scenes of storytelling so central to sentimental fiction in late eighteenth-century Britain? Shifts in narrative level, where a character tells their story—most often of tragic loss—to another character, are as familiar to readers of sentimental fiction as the tears its heroes and heroines shed. This essay analyzes the typical structure of embedding in a range of sentimental novels, including Man of Feeling, David Simple, History of Emily Montague, and Millenium Hall, in order to show how narrative exchanges most often involve the exchange of money and moral feeling. The “narrative of a narrative” that embedded stories tell concerns the historical tensions between virtue and commerce at a nascent moment in the history of capitalism and scenes of storytelling work to manage capitalism’s foundational contradiction between use value and exchange value. The essay ultimately demonstrates how stories-within-stories in sentimental novels are, themselves, embedded within capitalism’s system of exchange.

Feminist Literary History: How Do We Know We’ve Won?

This essay pronounces the death of women’s writing as a field of study and then argues for its resurrection. Women’s writing needs a new body; the hard-fought gains in institutional infrastructure for its study—the editing projects, databases, scholarly organizations, journals and curricula—must continue. But its current content, its specific modes of study, has placed the field on a trajectory to scholarly morbidity. We need a new queen of the Amazons. She might resemble her mother in scholarly rigour and attentiveness to intersectional differences, but she will look more like her second-wave grandmother in her theoretical boldness and political commitment.

The Seduction Narrative in Britain by Katherine Binhammer. (Review)

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