Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette is probably the finest of the sentimental novels of the early national period. Psychologically astute, wellplotted, and carefully written, the novel portrays sens...
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Hannah Webster Foster is the author of one of the best and most successful sentimental novels of the early national period. Attributed only to "A Lady of Massachusetts," Foster's The Coquette (1797) w...
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In the following essay, Shuffelton discusses The Coquette in the context of the changing culture in eighteenth-century America, focusing on how fashionable behavior displaced religious dictates as the...
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In the following essay, Smith-Rosenberg examines Eliza as representative of the nascent middle class in eighteenth-century America, characterized by a desire for individualism and risk-taking. Accordi...
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In the following essay, Pettengill analyzes the function of the circle of female friends in The Coquette and The Boarding School, asserting that the parallel plot involving what happens to this powerf...
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In the following essay, Waldstreicher evaluates the unspoken communication of sentiment that aids characters in interpreting one another's actions, noting that women's subjective experie...
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In the following essay, Harris suggests that in The Coquette, Foster satirizes women's social reality and sentimental language in order to expose the sexist basis of the national political ideo...
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In the following essay, Brown interprets Eliza's plight in The Coquette in terms of her self-determination, or desire to create her own individual identity. Brown points out that women's...
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In the following excerpt, Stern explores the connection between women's imagination and freedom in The Coquette, concluding that women lacked true freedom in the American republic of the time.
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In the following essay, Richards examines the motif of theatricality in The Coquette and The Boarding School as a paradigm for women's lives in the America of Foster's era, noting that w...
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Hannah Webster Foster
Critical Essay by Frank Shuffelton
