The Debate Over Feminine Virtue: Womanhood, Book History, and Commercially Successful Fiction, 1750-1765
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation is the first dedicated study of commercially successful narratives about women published between 1750-1765. Based on strongly empirical research rooted in a stringent book historical framework, the project recovers once-popular fiction and analyzes this mass of largely unstudied material from a feminist critical perspective. Scholarship has consistently underestimated midcentury novels, usually viewing them as complacent texts about chaste and obedient women. However, when one examines the books that sold well at the time, a different story emerges. These narratives were a testing ground for new kinds of heroines and “good” women, an arena where readers could question social mores about gender and virtue. The four chapters of this dissertation examine how popular novels considered womanhood in diverse and often critical ways. Chapter one introduces readers to the twenty-nine most commercially successful books about women published between 1750-1765 and describes the range of heroines and social arguments in mainstream texts. Chapter two examines the period’s most successful feminocentric novel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), translated into English as Eloisa (1761). Eloisa’s impassioned readers left behind a wealth of fascinating responses to the novel’s controversial subjects including premarital sex, interclass relationships, and love matches. Chapter three explores diametric treatments of womanhood and poetic justice in two novels: the genre-bending commercial failure The Cry (1754) by Jane Collier and Sarah Fielding, and Sarah Fielding’s modestly successful solo effort The Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia (1757). Chapter four recovers a fascinating subgenre that I term “Miss Adventures.” These were commercially viable comedies about courtesans and actresses who rebuff social mores yet are admired and rewarded. The coda concludes the project with a brief discussion of how popular literature could impact readers, especially women. Ultimately, this dissertation reveals the tremendous scholarly rewards of studying commercially successful fiction. This material changes our view of the mid-eighteenth-century literary marketplace, reveals a mass readership’s preferences, and allows scholars to see the 1750s and 1760s as a critical and profoundly experimental period of literary history, especially regarding depictions of women and treatments of female experience.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".