The Noble Slaves

The Noble Slaves
Author: Penelope Aubin
Publisher: Broadview Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2023-08-29
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 177048891X

This is the first ever critical edition of Penelope Aubin’s The Noble Slaves, a novel that shows women as both moral exemplars and independent adventurers in foreign lands. Its tales of seduction, imprisonment, and escape engage with contemporary debates about arbitrary authority and slavery—particularly in relation to the lives of women. In one brief and fast-paced novel, Aubin brings together the aristocratic romance and the world of trade with the themes of empire and colonialism. Sometimes assessed as a pious conservative or a popular sensationalist, Aubin used fiction as a vehicle for addressing the deepest moral and political concerns of her time, and The Noble Slaves will allow new readers to understand her importance to the history of the novel. The appendices to this Broadview Edition include contemporary fiction and historical documents on slavery, piracy, and Orientalism.

The Life of Madame de Beaumount and The Life of Charlotta du Pont

The Life of Madame de Beaumount and The Life of Charlotta du Pont
Author: Penelope Aubin
Publisher: Broadview Press
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2023-06-30
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1770488790

The prose fiction of Penelope Aubin, including the two texts included in this edition—The Life of Madam de Beaumount (1721) and The Life of Charlotta Du Pont (1723), offers a delightful and provocative challenge to many of our standard ways of thinking about both the “rise of the novel” in eighteenth-century Britain and about women writers in that era. Aubin’s fast-paced highlights the persistence and vitality of romance as a form of storytelling, and the centrality of teenaged girls to tales that extend far beyond the domestic and amatory modes with which women writers have traditionally been associated. Aubin’s resourceful heroines and the often spectacular violence they engage in in order to defend their lives and bodily integrity against threats allow us a more expansive and exciting view of early eighteenth-century fiction than the current classroom canon often permits. In narratives spanning the globe and featuring pirates, North African corsairs, Jacobites, shipwrecks, and seraglios, Aubin delivers a form of fiction with roots that go back to antiquity and commitments that often feel far more modern than most other texts from the eighteenth century.

The Prose of Things

The Prose of Things
Author: Cynthia Sundberg Wall
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2014-10-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 022622502X

Virginia Woolf once commented that the central image in Robinson Crusoe is an object—a large earthenware pot. Woolf and other critics pointed out that early modern prose is full of things but bare of setting and description. Explaining how the empty, unvisualized spaces of such writings were transformed into the elaborate landscapes and richly upholstered interiors of the Victorian novel, Cynthia Sundberg Wall argues that the shift involved not just literary representation but an evolution in cultural perception. In The Prose of Things, Wall analyzes literary works in the contexts of natural science, consumer culture, and philosophical change to show how and why the perception and representation of space in the eighteenth-century novel and other prose narratives became so textually visible. Wall examines maps, scientific publications, country house guides, and auction catalogs to highlight the thickening descriptions of domestic interiors. Considering the prose works of John Bunyan, Samuel Pepys, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, David Hume, Ann Radcliffe, and Sir Walter Scott, The Prose of Things is the first full account of the historic shift in the art of describing.

The Life of Charlotta Du Pont, an English Lady (Dodo Press)

The Life of Charlotta Du Pont, an English Lady (Dodo Press)
Author: Penelope Aubin
Publisher:
Total Pages: 172
Release: 2010-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781409979203

Penelope Aubin (c. 1679-c. 1738) was an English novelist and translator. Her works include: The Stuarts: A Pindarique Ode (1707), The Extasy: A Pindarick Ode to Her Majesty The Queen (1708), The Strange Adventures of the Count de Vinevil and His Family (1721), The Life of Madam de Beaumount, A French Lady (1721), The Life and Amorous Adventures of Lucinda (1721), The Noble Slaves; or, The Lives and Adventures of Two Lords and Two Ladies (1722), History of Genghizcan the Great (1722), The Life of Charlotta du Pont, An English Lady (1723) and The Life and Adventures of the Lady Lucy (1726).

The History of British Women's Writing, 1690 - 1750

The History of British Women's Writing, 1690 - 1750
Author: R. Ballaster
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2010-09-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0230298354

This volume charts the most significant changes for a literary history of women in a period that saw the beginnings of a discourse of 'enlightened feminism'. It reveals that women engaged in forms old and new, seeking to shape and transform the culture of letters rather than simply reflect or respond to the work of their male contemporaries.