Matched pairs : gender and intertextual dialogue in eighteenth-century fiction /

Bartolomeo (Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst) aims to correct the "essentialist" consequences of much feminist criticism of early English women novelists by investigating the intertextual dialogues between five cross-gendered pairs of novels: Eliza Haywood's "Unfortunate Mistress" (Idalia) and Defoe's "Fortunate Mistress" (Roxana); Sarah Fielding's reversal, in David Simple, of the heroic paradigm of Joseph Andrews; Charlotte Lennox's comic revision (The Female Quixote) of Clarissa; Roderick Random and Evelina as gendered quests of personal identity; and the importance of narrative and authorial confession in Lewis's The Monk and Radcliffe's The Italian. Modeled on Ann Messenger's rather informal approach to cross-gendered texts in His and Hers (CH, Jan'87), Bartolomeo's latter-day focus on a single genre--embracing a generation of feminist and historicist opinion on the place of women writers in the rise of the novel--results in a denser, more problematic study that resists neat summary and undermines conventional distinctions like "male/female Gothic" and "male bildungsroman." A concluding chapter relates the different intertextual strategies examined to the preconceptions that readers brought to these novels at different times during the formative century of the novel. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Academic collections serving upper-division undergraduates through faculty. G. R. Wasserman emeritus, Russell Sage College