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Chapter 4 explores how a range of popular spy guides published in the second half of the eighteenth century both shape and reflect a sense of the city as home to fraud and deception. It situates these surveys of urban life alongside earlier precursors like Ned Ward’s The London Spy and mid-century writing about the city, including the novel, that presented the city as home to various cheats and frauds. The repetitive works, in which a new arrival is taken on a tour through the city by one versed in its ways, highlight various tensions in the representation of the metropolis in the period, including between claims to novelty and the repetition of familiar scenes and between an understanding of the city as a space of false appearances and an insistence that these performances can be read and understood.
This Element offers a multidimensional study of reading practice and sibling rivalry in late eighteenth-century Britain. The case study is the Aberdeen student and disgraced thief Charles Burney's treatment of Evelina (1778), the debut novel of his sister Frances Burney. Coulombeau uses Charles's manuscript poetry, letters, and marginalia, alongside illustrative prints and circulating library archives, to tell the story of how he attempted to control Evelina's reception in an effort to bolster his own socio-literary status. Uniting approaches drawn from literary studies, biography, bibliography, and the history of the book, the Element enriches scholarly understanding of the reception of Frances Burney's fiction, with broader implications for studies of gender, class, kinship and reading in this period. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Modern scholars have achieved consensus that Frances Burney was writing satire in her novels, acknowledging the range of Burney’s satiric targets and tones, and the merging and submerging of her satire with comedy, irony, melodrama, and sentimentalism. Yet Burney’s contemporary reviewers did not identify Burney as a satirist. In fairness, satire defies easy definition, and the status of satiric fiction when Burney was writing at the end of the eighteenth century was far less secure than at the beginning of the period. Furthermore, satire was gendered as male at the time; women were seen as the targets of satire, not its practitioners. So even when Burney’s reviewers and readers did recognize satiric elements in her work, she was seen as a sentimental novelist, a didactic novelist, a romantic novelist – as anything but a satirist. And Burney did not identify herself as a satirist either. In doing so, Burney was passing – hiding in plain sight as a satirist, defying the conventions of women writers and novelists of her time.
Chapter 2 reveals the frustrating and interminable process of revision for Frances Burney in a survey of all of her novels.Her first two novels, Evelina (1778) and Cecilia (1782), reveal that she submitted to the actual and perceived criticisms of family and friends in ways that diminished her initial innovative aims, including the deletion of a scene containing satanic rites in her Cecilia manuscript.Burney’s last two novels evince a reversal in her revision practices and display her later-in-life tendencies toward verbal excess.Her post-publication revisions to Camilla (1796) show her inability to moderate repetitive characterization and Gothicize her text in the case of the tantalizingly unfinished third edition.As with her changes to later editions of Camilla, Burney’s planned revisions to The Wanderer (1814) were motivated by her dissatisfaction with negative reviews and her unwillingness to relinquish control of her novels.Her final revisions demonstrate her recognition of the never-ending potential of the early novel form.
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