Gary Gautier
  • Home
  • Children's Literature
  • Literary Criticism
  • Gary's Books
  • Philosophy, Misc
  • Photos and Travel
  • Bio and Contact

Selected Literary Criticism

Picture
Books
Landed Patriarchy in Fielding's Novels: Fictional Landscapes, Fictional Genders (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998), 360 pages.
See the
Amazon link for purchase. You can find used copies for under $20, but list price is $119 for new.

Landed Patriarchy looks at the intersection of class and gender politics in such Henry Fielding novels as Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews. Fielding repeatedly attacks the gender constructs of bourgeois patriarchy, but does so to promote a landed patriarchy and not from any feminist sympathy.  Understanding the unstable relation between class and gender conservatism in Fielding requires a larger look at 18th-century literature and culture, and at how modern theoretical approaches can sometimes clarify and sometimes muddle our view of  what is going on in the great literary works of the past.


Picture
Intro. to the Random House/Modern Library edition of the 18th-century erotic novel, John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (2001).

The eighteenth-century British were not only remapping world territories, but were also involved at home in the concomitant remapping of conceptual space to suit the new world of bourgeois capitalism. In the first pornographic novel written in English, John Cleland remaps the concepts of sexuality, female identity, and maternity, and pins the remapping to an emergent bourgeois ideology. Just as prostitution figures as bourgeois social relations unmasked, so on the level of genre the pornographic novel unmasks the sentimental bourgeois novel of the day. In satirizing bourgeois constructions of gender, Cleland is not at all boxed into a feminist vantage point but rather assumes a position that is generally sympathetic to the landed conservatism of Bolingbroke and Fielding and Smollett.  

See the Amazon link for purchase.


Book Reviews
“Separation and Contact,” Review of Terra Firma (Austin: Agave Noir, 2005), in FYI 2:1, p. 18.
Review of Michael Ford’s Carbon (poetry), Pulse Literary Jour. (www.heartsoundspress.com, 2007).

Published Articles
“Slavery and the Fashioning of Race in Oroonoko, Robinson Crusoe, and Equiano’s Life,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 42 (2001): 161-79.
“Gothic Villains, Romantic Heroes, and a New Age of Power Relations,” Genre 32 (1999): 201-34.
"Henry and Sarah Fielding on Romance and Sensibility," Novel 31 (1998): 195-214.
"Fanny Hill's Mapping of Sexuality, Female Identity, and Maternity," Studies in English Literature (Summer 1995).
"Marriage and Family in Fielding's Fiction," Studies in the Novel (Summer 1995).
"Class, Gender, and the Unreliable Narrator in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure," Style 28 (1994): 133-45.

Selected Conference Papers
"Gender Conservatism in Ann Radcliffe's The Italian," Northeast American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (NEASECS), Worcester, September 1996.
"Male Identity in the Cradle of Sentiment: Richardson's Clarissa." National Convention of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), Austin, 1996.
"Incest in Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones." NEASECS, New York, October 1994.
"The Sublime and the Abject: From Milton's Satan to the Gothic Villain." NEASECS Conference, Ottawa, September 1995.
"Golden Age Myths in Eighteenth-Century English Literature."  International Myth and Fantasy Conference, Atlanta, October 1991.
"The Modernist Sublime." The Context of Modernism, West Virginia, September 1991.

I welcome all feedback on any of my writing: drggautier@gmail.com.



Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.