Women and the Rise of the Novel, 1405-1726

• Published in: Bunyan studies no. 9; p. 90
• Main Author: Amigoni, David
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Newcastle Upon Tyne Northumbria University, Department of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, Design and Social Sciences 01.01.1999
• Subjects: Behn, Aphra (1640-1689); British & Irish literature; Bunyan, John (1628-1688); De Pizan, Christine; English literature
• ISSN: 0954-0970

From the literary-historical perspective, she seeks to broaden the canon of women's prose fiction recognised as prefiguring the emergence of the novels of the 1720s-40s celebrated by Ian Watt: accordingly, Aphra Behn is assigned less prominence and significance than the relatively neglected Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle's Nature's Pictures (1656) and Sociable Letters (1664). [...]Donovan argues for a broadening of the canon which recognises the importance of continental precursors such as Marguerite de Navarre, whose framed-novelle Heptaméron appeared in France 1549; and the Spaniard Maria de Zaya y Sotomayor's works from the 1630s and 40s. [...]Bakhtin's theory of the novel as a relentlessly parodie and subversive anti-genre is crucial to the Marxist orientation of Donovan's argument; as is his theory of 'prosaics' as a mode of system-defying representation which resists the 'theoretism' of poetics. [...]Donovan's study can become unproductively caught up in a hunt for the 'first novel', or some missing feminist link in the novel's inexorable rise, when surely it would be better to acknowledge that 'the novel' can be traced to a multiplicity of originary points throughout cultural history.