• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.5
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• pp.793-820
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• 2009

The studies of correspondence between novel and nation-state, among which The Rise of the Novel by Ian Watt is supposed to be the first book, have flourished for more than twenty years, encouraged by Benedict Anderson's and Cathy Davidson's works. According to them, the novel should come simultaneously with, or after the foundation of the nation-state, and testify to its production or the emergence of its subject/citizen. This paper questions about these prepositions, trying to introduce a new paradigmatical approach, "between global and transnational historical approach," to first novels in transatlantic areas including England and atlantic coastal areas. In its complex relation to a variety of colonial, post-colonial, and transnational geopolitics, various cultural practices such as history, traveler's tales and epistolary novels can be included in the genre of the novel. The idea of the sexual contract by Carole Pateman is very useful because it helps more clearly understand the nature of relation between men and women in the capitalist reproduction, while the social contract tells about the relation between men as citizens. Unlike Freud in Totem and Taboo, Zilboorg argues that there were primordial and violent scenes such as rape before the first sexual contract. This paper will illuminate that "the rise of the novel" corresponded with the emergence of the sexual contract. In the so-called first novel Pamela, the heroine Pamela was threatened to be violated by Mr. B., and was really even confined in his cottage. Mary Rowlandson's The Captive Narrative shows that her body was confined as an English female captive, and troubled with imaginary rape by Indians which resulted in the unequal sexual contract between her and her puritan community in America. However, Leonora Sansay's Secret History in an alternative communality, which was not a nation-state, was different from both novels mentioned above, in that it shows the possibility of emancipation from their unequal marriage, the sexual contract. Therefore, it can be argued that "between global and transnational historical approach" has a possibility to provide a new vision of global sisterhood and solidarity to recognize globalized women's violence, and free themselves from the unequal sexual contract.