Abstract
Feminist literary criticism, since its very inception, has worked to turn critical orthodoxies upside down and, in Blakean cadence, to reveal the infinite which was hid and the sexism which had been ignored. One of the most valuable ways in which this re-visioning has been achieved is through fiercely direct (as well as subtly oblique) polemical assaults on the truths and truisms of patriarchal criticism. The ground of academic debate has been so radically shifted because feminists have, quite simply, moved it from under the feet of their institutionally ensconced fathers.
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Notes
For a discussion of this material see Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, The Ideology of Conduct (New York and London: Methuen, 1987)
William St. Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys (London: Faber & Faber, 1991) pp. 504–11.
Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with strictures on political and moral subjects (1792)
Mary Wollstonecraft, The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, 7 vols, Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (eds) (London: William Pickering, 1989) vol. 5, p. 164.
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) 6th edn 1770, pp. 222–3.
James Fordyce, The Character and Conduct of the Female Sex (1776) p. 45.
One of the best discussions of the rise of the moral mother is provided by Jane Rendall, The Origins of Modern Feminism (London: Macmillan, 1985) pp. 33–65.
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© 1994 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Bruder, H. (1994). The Sins of the Fathers: Patriarchal Criticism and The Book of Thel. In: Clark, S., Worrall, D. (eds) Historicizing Blake. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23477-6_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23477-6_9
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