The Letters in the Story

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eve Tavor Bannet
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
Aphra Behn ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Charlotte Lennox ◽  
Frances Burney ◽  
Women Novelists ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Epistolary Novels

The long tradition of mixta-genera fiction, particularly favoured by women novelists, which combined fully-transcribed letters and third-person narrative has been largely overlooked in literary criticism. Working with recognized formal conventions and typical thematic concerns, Tavor Bannet demonstrates how narrative-epistolary novels opposed the real, situated, transactional and instrumental character of letters, with their multi-lateral relationships and temporally shifting readings, to merely documentary uses of letters in history and law. Analyzing issues of reading and misreading, knowledge and ignorance, communication and credulity, this study investigates how novelists adapted familiar romance plots centred on mysteries of identity to test the viability of empiricism's new culture of fact and challenge positivism's later all-pervading regime of truth. Close reading of narrative-epistolary novels by authors ranging from Aphra Behn and Charlotte Lennox to Frances Burney and Wilkie Collins tracks transgenerational debates, bringing to light both what Victorians took from their eighteenth-century forbears and what they changed.

The Rise and Decline of the Epistolary Novel, 1770–1832

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ros Ballaster
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Charlotte Lennox ◽  
Frances Burney ◽  
Tobias Smollett ◽  
Charlotte Smith ◽  
Epistolary Novel ◽  
Colonial Experience ◽  
Main Protagonist ◽  
Epistolary Exchange

This essay charts the fortunes of a specific genre, the epistolary novel, which delivers plot and character exclusively through letters whether from a single correspondent, a couple, or many. In the shadow of Richardson’s dominance, there are successive attempts to innovate and experiment both of personality (presenting new kinds of voice and main protagonist) and geography (sending letter-writers to parts of the globe ‘new’ to English readers). It opens with the healthy flourishing of letter fiction from 1769 to 1780 and the twin traditions of domestic (Elizabeth Griffith, Frances Burney) and picaresque (Tobias Smollett). The epistolary mode is next experimented with in the 1790s to describe and define both revolutionary turmoil and colonial experience by authors such as Charlotte Smith, Eliza Fenwick, Phoebe Gibbes, and Charlotte Lennox. The early decades of the eighteenth century see the troubled departure from and live burial of epistolary exchange in the novels of Edgeworth, Owenson, and Scott.

Outlaws and Misfits: The Identities of Modernist Criticism

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 337-356
Author(s):  
Ben Knights
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
Emotional Maturity ◽  
English Departments ◽  
Emotional Autonomy ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Implicit Identity ◽  
The University ◽  
Cultural Positioning

The images of the writer as exile and outlaw were central to modernism's cultural positioning. As the Scrutiny circle's ‘literary criticism’ became the dominant way of reading in the University English departments and then in the grammar-schools, it took over these outsider images as models for the apprentice-critic. English pedagogy offered students not only an approach to texts, but an implicit identity and affective stance, which combined alert resistance to the pervasive effects of mechanised society with a rhetoric of emotional ‘maturity’, belied by a chilly judgementalism and gender anxiety. In exchanges over the close reading of intransigent, difficult texts, criticism's seminars sought a stimulus to develop the emotional autonomy of its participants against the ‘stock response’ promulgated by industrial capitalism. But refusal to reflect on its own method meant such pedagogy remained unconscious of the imitative pressures that its own reading was placing on its participants.

The Female Quixote

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Lennox ◽  
Margaret Anne Doody
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Women's Literature ◽  
Samuel Johnson ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Charlotte Lennox

The Female Quixote (1752), a vivacious and ironical novel parodying the style of Cervantes, portrays the beautiful and aristocratic Arabella, whose passion for reading romances leads her into all manner of misunderstandings. Praised by Fielding, Richardson and Samuel Johnson, the book quickly established Charlotte Lennox as a foremost writer of the Novel of Sentiment. With an excellent introduction and full explanatory notes, this edition will be of particular interest to students of women's literature, and of the eighteenth-century novel.

scholarly journals Growing Up Burney

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorna Clark
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Family Members ◽  
Original Compositions ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Frances Burney ◽  
Family Identity ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
Writing Practices ◽  
The Family

The pressure of family identity and politics affected more than one generation of Burneys. Beyond Frances Burney, and her intense relationship with her father Charles Burney, were other family members who also felt the pressure to “write & read & be literary.” These tendencies can be seen most clearly in the works of juvenilia preserved in the family archive. A commonplace book bound in vellum has been discovered that preserves more than one hundred poems, mostly original compositions written by family and friends. The activity of commonplacing reflects a community in which reading and writing are valued. Collected by the youngest sister of Frances Burney, they seem to have been copied after she married. The juvenile writings of her nieces and nephews preponderate, whose talents were encouraged, as they give versified expression to their deepest feelings and fears. Literary influences of the Romantic poets can be traced, as the young authors define themselves in relation to these materials. Reflecting a kind of self-fashioning, the commonplace book helps these young writers explore their sense of family identity through literary form. This compilation represents a collective expression of authorship which can inform us about reading and writing practices of women and their families in the eighteenth century.

scholarly journals Emotions vocabulary and the reconceptualisation of emotions in Ann Radcliffe’s “The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents”

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-58
Author(s):  
Elena D. Andonova-Kalapsazova
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Emotional Experience ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Emotional Experiences ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
Francis Hutcheson ◽  
History Of

The article undertakes the analysis of Ann Radcliffe’s novel The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797) from a history of literary emotions perspective which, I argue, yields insights into the attitudes towards emotions embedded in Radcliffe’s works. A reading of the novel from such a perspective also complements the critical studies of the artist’s engaging with the eighteenth-century cult of sensibility. The novel is read as a text that registered but also participated in the dissemination of an epistemology of emotional experience articulated in the idiom of eighteenth-century moral philosophers – Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Adam Smith - at the same time as it retained some of the older, theology-based conceptions of passions and affections. The dynamic in which the two frameworks for understanding the emotions exist in the novel is explored through a close reading of the vocabulary in which Radcliffe rendered the emotional experiences of her fictional characters. In this reading it is the passions which are found to have been invested with a variety of meanings and attributed a range of moral valences that most noticeably foreground the movement from a generally negative towards a more complex appreciation of powerful emotions.

Reading

Overwhelmed ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 19-56
Author(s):  
Maurice S. Lee
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Robinson Crusoe ◽  
Main Concept ◽  
Interpretive Practices ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Literary Experience

This chapter reviews some roots of modern literary criticism by showing how some romantics respond to textual excess by variously resisting and adopting informational strategies of skimming and excerpting. A main concept of the chapter is “deserted island reading,” an ideal of immersive literary experience formed in opposition to mass print. The fantasy of losing oneself in a book unfolds across the legacy of Robinson Crusoe, which projects an account of intensive hermeneutics from the eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Deserted island reading was especially attractive to romantics such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a founding figure of modern close reading whose aesthetics and interpretive practices were formed under the pressures of information. But whereas Coleridge offers an agonistic example of the relationship between information and literature, Ralph Waldo Emerson presents a more modulated case in which the prophet of subjectivity, intuition, and motility that proves surprisingly open to informational modes of reading.

Censura y traducción

Babel ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-38
Author(s):  
Eterio Pajares
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Spanish Version ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
History Of ◽  
Heavy Burden ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetic Distance

Abstract Britain’s involvement in the War of the Spanish Succession was such a heavy burden for this country that many essays were written against prolonging the struggle. To this, John Arbuthnot (this satire was wrongly attributed to Swift for many years) contributed with The History of John Bull, a collection of fine satirical pamphlets designed to put and end to the campaign, and advocating a return to peace and common sense. It was soon translated into French and, from this language, Juan Ignacio de Ayestaran tried to produce a Spanish version. However, this version was not authorised by the harsh and voracious Spanish censorship of the period. This essay offers a comparative critical study of the translation and analyses the censors’ reasons for rejecting it. The close reading of this fine satirical work makes the arguments for rebuffing the authorisation so obvious that one wonders to what extent some eighteenth century translators were really aware of the time they were living in and the aesthetic distance between two countries so geographically near but so alien in freedom and tradition. Résumé Le rôle de la Grande-Bretagne dans la guerre de succession espagnole a été un tel fardeau pour ce pays que de nombreux essais ont été écrits contre la poursuite de la lutte. John Arbuthnot y a contribué avec L’histoire de John Bull (pendant de nombreuses années, cette satire a été attribuée à tort à Swift). Cette collection de superbes pamphlets satiriques, conçus pour mettre fin à la campagne et préconisant le retour à la paix et au bon sens, a rapidement été traduite en français. En partant de cette langue, Juan Ignacio de Ayestaran a tenté de produire une version espagnole. Toutefois, cette version n’a pas été autorisée par la censure espagnole, dure et dévorante, de l’époque. Cet essai propose une étude critique comparative de la traduction et analyse les raisons pour lesquelles le censeur l’a rejetée. Une lecture attentive de cette belle oeuvre satirique rend tellement évidents les arguments invoqués pour l’interdire qu’on se demande dans quelle mesure certains traducteurs du dix-huitième siècle étaient vraiment conscients de l’époque où ils vivaient et de la distance esthétique entre deux pays, si proches géographiquement parlant et pourtant si distants sur le plan de la liberté et de la tradition.

"The Farcical History of Richard Greenow": Aldous Huxley and the Anxieties of Male Authorship

1993 ◽  
Vol 3 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 197-208
Author(s):  
Robin Ann Sheets
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Gender Studies ◽  
Aldous Huxley ◽  
Psychological Approach ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Social Activist ◽  
Women Novelists ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Forms

Abstract Aldous Huxley's first piece of published fiction, "The Farcical History of Richard Greenow" (1920), reveals anxieties about authorship and sexual iden-tity that were typical of modernist male writers. This article situates this nou-vella in two contexts. The first concerns Huxley's relationship with his aunt, novelist and social activist Mary Augusta Arnold Ward; the second centers on medical theories of homosexuality presented by Havelock Ellis in Sexual Inversion (1897). The protagonist calls himself a spiritual hermaphrodite because his body is inhabited by two personalities: a male intellectual and an increasingly aggressive female novelist and war propagandist named Pearl Bellairs. As a caricature of Mrs. Humphrey Ward, Pearl reveals Huxley's antagonism toward powerful and popular women novelists. But she also provides a way for protag-onist and author to defend themselves against same-sex eroticism. Ideology does not determine desire. Rather, in the story, as in Sexual Inversion, fears aroused by certain desires seek expression in specific cultural forms. (Literary criticism, psychological approach; gender studies)

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