Jane Barker and the Politics of Catholic Celibacy
Jane Barker's amatory novel, Love Intrigues (1713), presents a snapshot of English Jacobite Catholic culture at James II's exiled Court in St. Germain-en-Laye. As evidenced in her Galesia Trilogy and poetry, Barker's narratives promote Catholic monasticism and its advantages for English women such as retreat, education, and the preservation of a feminist history. That the 1719 edition of Love Intrigues minimizes these overt Catholic emphases suggests that Barker's representation of Royalist Catholic solidarity in the first edition was too controversial later, due to recent and imminent Jacobite activity in England.
"Stop a Moment at this Preface": The Gendered Paratexts of Fielding, Barker, and Haywood
Sarah Fielding's didactic novel, The Governess, or Little Female Academy (1749), opens with a preface that calls attention to itself as a space worthy of the reader's consideration.1 It pleads, "Before you begin the following Sheets, I beg you will stop a Moment at this Preface, to consider with me, what is the true Use of Reading" (vii). The preface continues in an instructive vein, arguing that the "true use of reading" a fictional text written by a woman author, about female characters, for a female audience, can be located in the story's ability to make its readers "wiser and better" by combining "Profit and Pleasure" (vii). While she overtly discusses her work's utility for the eighteenth-century reader, Fielding's preface raises questions concerning the "true use" of the preface for the woman author of eighteenth-century fiction. A close examination of her preface reveals how this marginal space encourages self-definition that blurs the distinction between author and character, fact and fiction, and text and pre-text. The formal strategies used to construct the character of the woman author within the preface are used to construct the female characters within the text and, it is implied, should be used by the reader to construct herself outside the text. While the utility of these mechanisms of self-definition are often not questioned within the body of the text, the preface reveals the conflicts that arise from the author's attempt to enact fictional strategies of self-
Career Choice Inclination of the College Graduates——under the Analytic Framework on the Basis of LMS Theory
Employment difficulty of college graduates has become a social problem in China today.The research group has found that college graduates have a strong inclination in career choice considering units and regions.In terms of China's manpower market and the segmented labor market theory,it is found that their inclination is caused by the great income gap of different regions,the high cost of job transfer,and the sharp differences in social welfare.It is thus obvious that solution to the problem lies with the gradual breakdown of the institutional segment of labor market.