Frances Burney and her readers. The negotiated image.

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 (17521840), 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.

Autorentext

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

Inhalt
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