Frances Burney and her readers. The negotiated image.
Summary
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the author
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Acknowledgments
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 “Snatching immortality for herself”
- Setting the scene
- Performing impeccable femininity
- Strategy 1: remaining anonymous to ensure unprejudiced reading
- Strategy 2: epistolary narrative as a means of construing an innocent heroine
- Strategy 3: construing the heroine’s innocence through diegesis and mimesis
- Strategy 4: intertextual contexts as misdirection
- Misdirection step 1: establishing the author’s superior understanding and moral backbone through insightful assessments of flawed femininity
- Mrs. Mirvan’s weakness
- Madame Duval: disgust and fascination with feminine entrails
- Mrs. Selwyn: disclaiming the masculine
- Misdirection step 2: a comic relief
- Conclusions: Burney’s Evelina as an illustration of eighteenth-century cultural sociability
- 2 Seven Veils cast off?
- Preface as a threshold of authorial image creation
- Defence of the novel – Empowering the authorial self
- Truth and fiction on the level of plot in The Wanderer
- The question of voice: technicalities of narrating a novel
- Bakhtin’s heteroglossia and Burney’s novels
- Language in the novel
- Conclusion: the dance of the author in Burney’s later novels
- 3 The art of retrograde motion
- Becoming the author of the author of her being28, or perfecting the art of retrograde motion
- Factual distortions of “borderline poetics”?
- The consummate art of crossing generic borders
- Dr. Burney’s daughter, Dr. Johnson’s heiress
- Conclusion: “her father’s representative”
- 4 “Her place in public estimate”
- The tradition of forgetting
- The path of domestification
- Other paths temporarily out of bounds
- “Her place in public estimate”, or “what others may write about her”
- The changing horizons and Burney studies
- Changing horizons stage 1: forgetting the novelist, assessing the diarist
- Changing horizons stage 2: political agendas
- The latest change in the horizons
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Series Page
Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available online at
http://dnb.d-nb.de
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the
Library of Congress.
ISSN 2191-1894
ISBN 978-3-631-80552-7 (Print)
E-ISBN 978-3-631-82116-9 (E-PDF)
E-ISBN 978-3-631-82117-6 (EPUB)
E-ISBN 978-3-631-82118-3 (MOBI)
DOI 10.3726/b16928
© Peter Lang GmbH
Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften
Berlin 2020
All rights reserved.
Peter Lang – Berlin ∙ Bern ∙ Bruxelles ∙ New York ∙ Oxford ∙ Warszawa ∙ Wien
All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any
utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without
the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to
prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions,
translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in
electronic retrieval systems.
About the author
Anna Paluchowska-Messing is a faculty member and teaches English Literature at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland.
About the book
Was it possible for an eighteenth-century woman to become a celebrity and remain respectable? Could women’s commercial success in literature be reconciled with contemporary ideals of prescribed feminine domesticity? The rugged trajectory marked by the critical reception of the works by Frances Burney (1752–1840), an English novelist, diarist and playwright, reveals the dilemmas she faced at different stages of her career from a debutante to an acclaimed literary figure. Burney’s long life is set against the background of changing conventions in culture consumption and appreciation, and the book highlights the successes and failures of the techniques which the author employed in her texts for projecting a favourable image of herself as a woman and writer.
This eBook can be cited
This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.
Acknowledgements
Any work which engrosses its writer for several years is in some way a collaboration, in the sense that few people are able to work without emotional and financial support, and encouragement. It is my pleasure to be able to express here my deepest gratitude to all my family and friends, whose love and support of all kinds sustained me during this project. I would also like to thank Jagiellonian University in Krakow, and the Institute of English Studies in particular, for the help and kindness I was offered while this book was being written. My special thanks go, naturally, to Professor Marta Gibińska-Marzec, who assisted me as a most wonderfully encouraging mentor on my journey back in time across eighteenth-century England.
Contents
Performing impeccable femininity
Strategy 1: remaining anonymous to ensure unprejudiced reading
Strategy 2: epistolary narrative as a means of construing an innocent heroine
Strategy 3: construing the heroine’s innocence through diegesis and mimesis
Strategy 4: intertextual contexts as misdirection
Madame Duval: disgust and fascination with feminine entrails
Mrs. Selwyn: disclaiming the masculine
Misdirection step 2: a comic relief
Conclusions: Burney’s Evelina as an illustration of eighteenth-century cultural sociability
2 Seven Veils cast off?: On the negotiation of the authorial image in Burney’s later novels
Preface as a threshold of authorial image creation
Defence of the novel – Empowering the authorial self
The question of voice: technicalities of narrating a novel
Bakhtin’s heteroglossia and Burney’s novels
Conclusion: the dance of the author in Burney’s later novels
3 The art of retrograde motion: Frances Burney’s Memoirs of Doctor Charles Burney
Becoming the author of the author of her being28, or perfecting the art of retrograde motion
Factual distortions of “borderline poetics”?
The consummate art of crossing generic borders
Dr. Burney’s daughter, Dr. Johnson’s heiress
Conclusion: “her father’s representative”
4 “Her place in public estimate”: An (after)word on Burney’s place in the literary canon
Details
- Pages
- 198
- Year
- 2020
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9783631821169
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9783631821176
- ISBN (MOBI)
- 9783631821183
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9783631805527
- DOI
- 10.3726/b16928
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2020 (April)
- Published
- Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Warszawa, Wien, 2020. 198 pp.
