Gender And Space In British Literature 1660 1820 Edited By Mona Narain And Karen Gevirtz British Literature In Context In The Long Eighteenth Century By Mona Narain 2014 02 01 -
Casual readers looking for a light overview—though the introduction is highly recommended even for them.
That idea—that space is gendered, and gender is spatialized—is the driving engine of the 2014 collection , edited by Mona Narain and Karen Gevirtz . Part of the British Literature in Context in the Long Eighteenth Century series, this volume offers a crucial intervention for students and scholars alike. What the Book Argues The central thesis is deceptively simple: Space is never neutral. Narain and Gevirtz bring together essays that examine how shifting definitions of public and private, urban and rural, domestic and foreign, directly influenced—and were influenced by—changing ideas about masculinity, femininity, and sexuality. Casual readers looking for a light overview—though the
Check your university library, WorldCat, or Routledge’s website. (The 2014 hardcover is expensive, but many chapters are available via academic databases like JSTOR or Project MUSE.) A Final Thought Narain and Gevirtz remind us that for 18th-century Britons—especially women, queer people, and colonial subjects—space was a battleground. To be denied a room, a road, or a voice in Parliament was to be denied existence. Literature, then, became a way of mapping alternative geographies, of claiming symbolic space even when physical space was denied. What the Book Argues The central thesis is
If you’ve ever studied the British long eighteenth century (the era of Restoration drama, Defoe’s castaways, Pope’s satires, and Austen’s drawing rooms), you know that where a scene takes place is rarely just a backdrop. A closet, a coffeehouse, a carriage, a colonial plantation, or a London street—these are not passive settings. They are active forces that shape what characters can do, say, or even think. (The 2014 hardcover is expensive, but many chapters