Product Description: This book examines how reading is represented within the novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Contemporary accounts portrayed the female reader in particular as passive and impressionable; liable to identify dangerously with the world of her reading...read more

The epistolary novel is a form which has been neglected in most accounts of the development of the novel. This book argues that the way that the eighteenth-century epistolary novel represented consciousness had a significant influence on the later novel. Critics have drawn a distinction between the self at the time of writing and the self at the time at which events or emotions were experienced. This book demonstrates that the tensions within consciousness are the result of a continual interaction between the two selves of the letter-writer and charts the oscillation between these two selves in the epistolary novels of, amongst others, Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Fanny Burney and Charlotte Smith.

Product Description: Punctuation, footnotes, epigraphs, typography, cover design, white space and marginalia are features which significantly affect the meaning of a literary text. This collection of essays draws attention to the importance of those textual elements traditionally ignored in literary criticism...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)