Anna Paluchowska-Messing

Frances Burney and her readers. The negotiated image.

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

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.

Produktdetails

• Text - Meaning - Context: Cracow Studies in English Language, Literature and Culture 16
• Verlag: Peter Lang
• Artikelnr. des Verlages: 280552
• Seitenzahl: 198
• Erscheinungstermin: 9. April 2020
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 216mm x 153mm x 16mm
• Gewicht: 331g
• ISBN-13: 9783631805527
• ISBN-10: 3631805527
• Artikelnr.: 59162527

Autorenporträt

Anna Paluchowska-Messing is a faculty member and teaches English Literature at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland.

Inhaltsangabe

Introduction

1 "Snatching immortality for herself": Construing the

image of the author in Frances Burney's Evelina

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?: 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

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: Frances Burney's Memoirs of



Doctor Charles Burney



Becoming the author of the author of her being, 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

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

diaris

Changing horizons stage 2: political agendas

The latest change in the horizons

Conclusion

Bibliography