1st Edition
Narratives of Women and Murder in England, 1680–1760 Deadly Plots
By Kirsten T. Saxton
Copyright 2009
162 Pages
by
Routledge
162 Pages
by
Routledge
162 Pages
by
Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
Arguing that the female criminal subject was central to the rise of the British novel, Kirsten T. Saxton provides fresh and convincing insights into the deeply complex ways in which categories of criminality, gender, and fiction intersected in the long eighteenth century. She offers the figure of the murderess as evidence of the constitutive relationship between eighteenth-century legal and... Read more
Contents: Introduction; Imagining murder in Augustan England: bodies of evidence; murder and gender; Moving violations: Aphra Benn, Delarivier Manley, and the romance of violence; 'Interesting memoirs of the most notorious characters': four 18th-century murderesses; 'The confines of virtue and the frontiers of vice': Daniel Defoe's Roxana, and Henry Fielding's Amelia; 'The prisoner at the bar': Mary Blandy and Henry Fielding; Epilogue; Select bibliography; Index.
Biography
Kirsten Saxton is an Associate Professor of English at Mills College in Oakland, California, USA.
’The narrativising of murder is the focus of Kirsten Saxton's lively and engaging study... Saxton's writing is witty and colourful and she engages a wide range of visual and written sources... Saxton's compelling and provocative study is to be welcomed for the light it begins to shed on one of our enduring objects of cultural fascination.’ Review of English Studies 'Kirsten Saxton has created a very valuable piece of scholarship for those interested in print accounts of female murderers in the long eighteenth century.' Journal of British Studies 'Narratives of Women and Murder in England is important as the first booklength study of the complex and conflicting relations among femininity, criminal violence, and narrative in eighteenth-century England. It is lively and strongly argued, and departs from previous work on criminality and gender in productive and provocative ways.' 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 'Narratives of Women and Murder is a compellingly written account that reveals the social constructs underlying narratives of both real and imagined crime.' Notes and Queries
