Unbecoming Women [antikvár]

PREFACE A book on the novel of development might seem a book invested, by definition, in notions of linear progress and coherent identity. Certainly the form and most discussions of the form have tended to invoke a purposeful youth advancing toward some clarity and stability of being. "Development," it has been said, emerged as a dominant idea in relation to Enlightenment confidence in human perfectibility, to Romantic views of childhood as prelude to creative manhood, and to the nineteenth-century general preoccupation with historicity. Out of these ideological contexts, and from the influence they continue to exert in the twentieth century, arose what English-language critics have variously named the "novel of development," "novel of formation," "apprentice novel, " or "Bildungsroman. " It is one project of this book to raise questions about these generic formulations and the understanding of development on which they rely. The unbecoming of my title is intended to push back against conventional assumptions about becoming and stories of becoming, and this pressure is obtained in large part by focusing on women. The women I discuss—Frances Burney, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and several conduct-book authors—wrote in