Writing women on the verge of individuality … Citizen subject, consumption and power in the nineteenth-century Swedish novel
Year: 2020
Type: article
Abstract: Three letter-writing nineteenth-century heroines lay out domestic worlds to their fictional readers in which moral sentiment and norms of citizenship versus individual desire are at stake. In an era of nascent capitalism and nation building, these are aspects of significance. But what role does writing letters play? And what impact do epistolary novels have on citizenship and gender at the time? With Michel Foucault and Étienne Balibar as theoretical framework, this article discusses three epistolary novels—The Illusions (1836) by Sophie von Knorring in connection to Grannarne (1837) by Fredrika Bremer and Araminta May (1838) by Carl Jonas Love Almqvist—in order to discern how female writing produces the gendered citizen.
Author: Caroline Haux
Institution: Stockholm University
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Funder: Riksbankens Jubileumsfond
OpenAlex ID: W3103218878