The Exalted Heroine and the Triumph of Order

The first part of this study provides background information to the eighteenth-century English novel, and includes discussion of the relationship between literature and ideology, literary realism, the fiction reading/purchasing public, and authorial intention and technique. The second focuses on seven diverse, yet representative, novels of the period, paying particular attention to the presentation of class, women and religion in the works examined. Whilst no grand theory is proposed, the writer seeks to utilise an approach derived from sociological and Marxist thought, and to employ it as a practical mode of criticism. Although some familiarity with the novels is assumed in the individual analyses of each work, the first part of the study should be of interest to anyone curious about eighteenth-century fiction and the more general issues considered.