Conduct Literature for Women, Part IV, 1770-1830 (Hardcover)

Social and literary historians recognise the 1790s as a moment of political crisis and turbulence in British history: the intense reactions in Britain to increasing revolutionary violence in France politicised almost every aspect of cultural life. The public sphere became the battleground of what Marilyn Butler terms 'the war of ideas'. At the centre of these discursive hostilities was the opposition between sentimentality, on the one hand, and rationality, on the other. Inextricably interlinked with these contrary values were notions of gender identity and class ideology. There was, however, no defining stabilisation of political or gender positions around the two values of sentiment and reason. Two of the most important literary forms utilised for expressing these discursive polemics were novels and treatises on education. A third equally significant and closely-related genre was that of conduct writing. Conduct Literature for Women IV, 1770-1830 makes available this body of writing, which has been less well studied in respect to the war of ideas than the former two.Yet, as the texts collected in this edition demonstrate, conduct writing was influentially engaged at the heart of the controversies that characterised the British public sphere during the critical decades across the turn of the century. Furthermore, looking at this body of texts from the wider time span of 1770 to 1830 allows for a clearer understanding of the shifting and ambiguous directions of opinion and debate than that afforded by a more narrow focus upon the 1790s.