Narrative Transvestism: Rhetoric and Gender in . Kahn<|

Narrative TransvestismRhetoric and Gender in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel\nAuthor(s): Madeleine Kahn\nFormat: Paperback\nPublisher: Cornell University Press, United States\nImprint: Cornell University Press\nISBN-13: 9780801497704, 978-0801497704\nSynopsis\nMany of the earliest canonical novelsincluding Defoe's Moll Flanders and Roxana and Richardson's Pamela and Clarissawere written by men who assumed the first-person narrative voice of women. What does it mean for a man to write his \""autobiography\"" as if he were a woman? What did early novelists have to gain from it, in a period when woman's realm was devalued and woman's voice rarely heard in public? How does the male author behind the voice reveal himself to readers, and how do our glimpses of him affect our experience of the novel? Does it matter if the woman he has created is believable as a woman? Why does \""she\"" inevitably rail against the perfidy of men?\n\n Kahn maintains that the answers to such questions lie in.