This book presents a unique sociological examination of British raciology, focusing on women's literary works of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and drawing from a range of academic disciplines, particularly literature, history and cultural studies. Wright traces the emergence of British modernity through the writings of a select group of women writers (including Jane Austen, Hannah More, Fanny Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and Maria Edgeworth) of diverse political and philosophical affiliations, and fills a gap in scholarship on feminist accounts of late...

There have been many voices in disciplines as various as philosophy, history, psychology, hermeneutics, literary theory, and theology that have claimed that narrative is fundamental to all that is human. Here is a book that, in an engaging and amusing way, presents a coherent thesis to that effect, connecting the Joke and the Story (with all that comedy and tragedy imply) not only with our sensing and perceiving of the world, but with our faith in each other, and what the character of that faith should be.