A ROMANCE WORLD OF THEIR OWN GENERIC AND PATRIARCHAL BOUNDARIES UNSETTLED IN “EVELINA” AND “THE FEMALE QUIXOTE”

Year 2021, , 147 - 166, 24.06.2021

Hakan Yılmaz

https://doi.org/10.33171/dtcfjournal.2021.61.1.6

Abstract

The continuity between the romance and the novel genres has been undermined since the
latter's emergence in the eighteenth century despite the conceptual confusion regarding
these genres at the time. Many critics de-contextualize the novel as if it came into being
merely as a reaction to and through a complete break with the former literary genres, and
hence fail to see its many connections to the romance in terms of structure and content.
Though we have today made more or less clear-cut distinctions between romance and
novel, the exible and interchangeable use of these terms for the better part of the
eighteenth century demonstrates that they overlap more than differ in their qualities.
Therefore, by bringing into the spotlight the romance elements and qualities prevalent in
the eighteenth-century novel, this paper aims at unearthing and exploring how certain
romance elements and generic instability of the novel genre open up a space and serve a
liberating function for Arabella and Evelina in the strictly patriarchal eighteenth-century
society in Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote (1752) and Frances Burney's Evelina
(1778).

Keywords

Frances Burney, Evelina, Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote, Romans, Türsel İstikrarsızlık

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