Description
Book SynopsisWas 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.
Table of ContentsIntroduction
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
