Gender And Space In British Literature 1660 1820 Edited By Mona Narain And Karen Gevirtz British Literature In Context In The Long Eighteenth Century By Mona Narain 2014 02 01 -
In our own era of remote work, gated communities, and debates over public monuments, that lesson feels more urgent than ever.
That idea—that space is gendered, and gender is spatialized—is the driving engine of the 2014 collection , edited by Mona Narain and Karen Gevirtz . Part of the British Literature in Context in the Long Eighteenth Century series, this volume offers a crucial intervention for students and scholars alike. What the Book Argues The central thesis is deceptively simple: Space is never neutral. Narain and Gevirtz bring together essays that examine how shifting definitions of public and private, urban and rural, domestic and foreign, directly influenced—and were influenced by—changing ideas about masculinity, femininity, and sexuality. In our own era of remote work, gated
Perhaps the most provocative section examines how colonial spaces (the Caribbean, India, the American colonies) were projected back onto British soil. The “exotic” room, the nabob’s mansion, or the trading company’s office—these were gendered spaces where British masculinity was both hardened and threatened. One essay might look at how Orientalist spaces in Restoration drama feminized the foreign “other” while bolstering British male authority. Why Read It in 2024 (and Beyond)? If you’re a graduate student, this book is a gold mine for dissertation chapters. Each essay is rigorous but accessible, blending historicist detail (maps, property laws, architectural plans) with literary close reading. What the Book Argues The central thesis is
Mapping the Margins: How Gender Shaped the Rooms, Roads, and Empires of British Literature (1660–1820) The “exotic” room, the nabob’s mansion, or the
Casual readers looking for a light overview—though the introduction is highly recommended even for them.
Travel narratives, picaresque novels, and even the new fashion for carriage rides become case studies. How did a woman’s mobility differ from a man’s? What happened when female characters ventured outside the domestic sphere in novels by Aphra Behn or Daniel Defoe? The essays argue that literal movement (or confinement) is a powerful metaphor for social agency.
Check your university library, WorldCat, or Routledge’s website. (The 2014 hardcover is expensive, but many chapters are available via academic databases like JSTOR or Project MUSE.) A Final Thought Narain and Gevirtz remind us that for 18th-century Britons—especially women, queer people, and colonial subjects—space was a battleground. To be denied a room, a road, or a voice in Parliament was to be denied existence. Literature, then, became a way of mapping alternative geographies, of claiming symbolic space even when physical space was denied.
