Frances Burney and Narrative Prior to Ideology |
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Author:
| McCrea, Brian |
ISBN: | 978-1-64453-069-6 |
Publication Date: | Sep 2013 |
Publisher: | University of Delaware Press
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Book Format: | Hardback |
List Price: | USD $102.95 |
Book Description:
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Frances Burney and Narrative Prior to Ideology works between Burney's Journals and Letters and her fiction more thoroughly than any study of her in the past twenty-five years. By doing so, it offers significant reinterpretations of Burney's four novels:
Evelina,
Cecilia,
Camilla, and
The Wanderer. It describes Burney's eluding the major modern-isms through which critics have tried to read her: Feminism (with its...
More Description Frances Burney and Narrative Prior to Ideology works between Burney's Journals and Letters and her fiction more thoroughly than any study of her in the past twenty-five years. By doing so, it offers significant reinterpretations of Burney's four novels: Evelina, Cecilia, Camilla, and The Wanderer. It describes Burney's eluding the major modern-isms through which critics have tried to read her: Feminism (with its "gendering" of beauty and reversal of gender roles); Capitalism and its Marxist critique (here the details of Burney's housekeeping become important); Professionalism (as a response to status inconsistency and class conflict); and Ian Watt's "Formal Realism" (Burney perhaps saved the novel from a sharp decline it suffered in the 1770s, even as she tried to distance herself from the genre).