Women’s ‘Defence-Narrative’ and its Role in the Formation of the Novel

Authors

  • Subhasish Guha

Keywords:

Defence-narrative, subgenre, formation of the novel, seventeenth century

Abstract

The practice of women defending themselves in writing, which is often called the “women’s defence-narrative,” is a tradition that emerged in the late medieval period and continued as a dominant strain in women’s writing through the early modern period. There have been studies on how Daniel Defoe, usually considered to be the first major English novelist, relied heavily on latter-day authors of the women’s defence-narrative, such as Mary Carleton. But there still remains room for detailed studies (as far as the history of the novel as a genre is concerned) critically examining the role played by the women’s defence-narratives in the formation of the novel. This article attempts to outline its history, with an emphasis on the seventeenth-century examples that contributed so importantly to the formation of the novel.

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Author Biography

Subhasish Guha

Subhasish Guha is, at present, a Guest faculty in the Department of English, Pritilata Waddedar Mahavidyalaya (University of Kalyani), Nadia, West Bengal. The author completed his undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in English from the University of Kalyani, West Bengal. He is currently in another postgraduate programme in Education from IGNOU. His areas of interest include Jacobean drama, Eighteenth-century British literature and Absurd drama. His present area of interest is pedagogy and aspects of outcome-based learning in the CBCS system at the undergraduate level.

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Published

2021-11-12

How to Cite

Guha, S. . (2021). Women’s ‘Defence-Narrative’ and its Role in the Formation of the Novel. Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry, 6(2), 62–71. Retrieved from https://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/132