A Romance World of Their Own: Generic and Patriarchal Boundaries Unsettled in Evelina and The Female Quixote

OpenAlex English

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).