Social Power and the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Foucault and Transparent Literary History
William B. Warner, SUNY
Volume 3, no. 3, April 1991
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
In a series of recent studies of the origins and beginnings of the novel, power — as issue and problem, theme and enigma — has become the magnetic north for critical inquiry and historical research. Two recent new historical studies of the early English novel — Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel and John Bender’s Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England — develop the Foucaultean premise about social power sketched in the quotation at the beginning of this essay. The novel, by inciting its readers into the pleasures of its narrative, becomes productively complicit with “power” in producing the modern subject and its most characteristic social forms — the domestic household and the penitentiary.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Clothing” include:
Clothes without Bodies: Objects, Humans, and the Marketplace in Eighteenth-Century It-Narratives and Trade Cards
by CHLOE WIGSTON SMITH (ECF 23.2, Winter 2010-11)
“With My Hair in Crystal”: Mourning Clarissa
by KATHLEEN M. OLIVER (ECF 23.1, Fall 2010)
Women’s Pockets and the Construction of Privacy in the Long Eighteenth Century
by ARIANE FENNETAUX (ECF 20.3, Spring 2008)
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