Eighteenth-Century Authorship and the Play of Fiction

Novels and the Theater, Haywood to Austen
1. Auflage 2011
ISBN: 978-0-415-69945-7
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 196 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 295 g

Reihe: Routledge Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature

This study looks at developments in eighteenth-century drama that influenced the rise of the novel; it begins by asking why women writers of this period experimented so frequently with both novels and plays. Here, Eliza Haywood, Frances Burney, Elizabeth Inchbald, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen explore theatrical frames--from the playhouse, to the social conventions of masquerade, to the fictional frame of the novel itself—that encourage audiences to dismiss what they contain as feigned. Yet such frames also, as a result, create a safe space for self-expression. These authors explore such payoffs both within their work—through descriptions of heroines who disguise themselves to express themselves—and through it. Reading the act of authorship as itself a form of performance, Anderson contextualizes the convention of fictionality that accompanied the development of the novel; she notes that as the novel, like the theater of the earlier eighteenth century, came to highlight its fabricated nature, authors could use it as a covert yet cathartic space. Fiction for these authors, like theatrical performance for the actor, thus functions as an act of both disclosure and disguise—or finally presents self-expression as the ability to oscillate between the two, in "the play of fiction."

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hodgson Anderson, Emily

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gender Studies, Geschlechtersoziologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Chapter One: Introduction: Playing at Authorship

Chapter Two: Rehearsing Desire: Eliza Haywood's Self-Conscious Performance

Chapter Three: Forgetting the Self: Frances Burney and Staged Insensibility

Chapter Four: Acting as Herself: Elizabeth Inchbald and Mediated Feelings

Chapter Five: Pedagogical Performance: Maria Edgeworth's Didactic Approach to Fiction

Epilogue—Generic Revolutions: Mansfield Park and the "Womanly Style" of Fiction

Notes

Index

Über Autor(innen)

An Associate Professor of English at the University of Southern California, Emily Hodgson Anderson specializes in the 18th-century novel, drama, and women writers. She has published extensively on these topics, and others, in journals such as Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Studies in the Novel, and ELH.