Women Novelists Before Jane Austen - 9781442610477

Women Novelists Before Jane AustenThe Critics and Their Canons\nAuthor(s): Brian Corman\nFormat: Paperback\nPublisher: University of Toronto Press, Canada\nImprint: University of Toronto Press\nISBN-13: 9781442610477, 978-1442610477\nSynopsis\nBy the time Ian Watt published The Rise of the Novel. in 1957, it was clear that many women novelists before Jane Austen had been overlooked in critical studies of literature and that some of them had been completely forgotten by the reading public. In this book, Brian Corman explores the question of how and why this came about. Corman provides a systematic survey of the reputations of early women novelists as canons of the novel developed over a period of roughly two hundred years, and, in so doing, suggests reasons for their frequent exclusion.\n\n Women Novelists before Jane Austen challenges the view that exclusion from the canon was a simple function of gender and goes deeper to examine potential reasons why certain women writers were over.