This week, Hannah assigns Stephanie Hannah Webster Foster’s 1797 epistolary novel The Coquette. Will Stephanie be an unwilling and resentful student of this early American seduction novel?
Eliza Wharton suddenly finds herself free of an advantageous but undesired engagement. Writing of her joy to her female friends, she expresses a desire to remain “free.” As she encounters further proposals of marriage and other less virtuous activities from male suitors, her correspondence with her friends–and theirs about her–reveal a longing for friendship and personal fulfillment at odds with the social values of her day. Join Stephanie and Hannah as they discuss despicable characters, delightfully aged language, and the importance of who lives, who dies, and who tells your story.
Resources:
Schweitzer, Ivy. "Foster's Coquette: Resurrecting Friendship from the Tomb of Marriage." Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, vol. 61 no. 2, 2005, p. 1-32. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/arq.2005.0009.
Ball, Molly. “The Liminal Time of Friendship: Narrative Delay in Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette.” Liminality, Hybridity, and American Women’s Literature: Thresholds in Women’s Writing, edited by Kristin J. Jacobson et al., Palgrave Macmillan (London), 2018, pp. 57-75.
https://www.womenhistoryblog.com/2011/12/hannah-foster.html
Books Hannah and Stephanie mention at the top of the podcast:
The Atlas Six by Olivie Barker
The Atlas Paradox by Olivie Barker
Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt
Notes on an Execution by Danya Kokafka
Tokyo Ueno Station by Miri Yu
People from My Neighborhood by Hiromi Kawakami
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami
Hester by Laurie Albanese
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk
The Anthropocene Review by John Green
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