Frances Burney and Narrative Prior to Ideology

<div> <p><i>Frances Burney and Narrative Prior to Ideology</i> 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: <i>Evelina</i> <i>Cecilia</i> <i>Camilla</i> and <i>The Wanderer</i>. 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).</p> <p>Burney's most successful writing appeared before the coining of ideology. But her standing prior to ideology is not a matter of chronological accident. Rather she quietly but forcefully resisted shared explanations-domesticity as model for household management debt as basis for family finance professional status as a means to social confidence the novel as the dominant literary genre-that became popular during her long and eventful life.</p> <p>Frederic Jameson has described Paul de Man in private conversation claiming Marxism . . . has no way of understanding the eighteenth century. <i>Frances Burney and Narrative Prior to Ideology</i> conjoins Burney's eighteenth-centuryness with her modernity.</p> Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.<br>  </div>