Ann Gaylin

Eavesdropping in the Novel from Austen to Proust

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Eavesdropping in the Novel from Austen to Proust investigates human curiosity and its representation in eavesdropping scenes in nineteenth-century English and French novels. Ann Gaylin argues that eavesdropping dramatises a primal human urge to know and offers a paradigm of narrative transmission and reception of information among characters, narrators and readers. Gaylin sheds light on the social and psychological effects of the nineteenth-century rise of information technology and accelerated flow of information, as manifested in the anxieties about - and delight in - displays of private life and its secrets. Analysing eavesdropping in Austen, Balzac, Collins, Dickens and Proust, Gaylin demonstrates the flexibility of the scene to produce narrative complication or resolution; to foreground questions of gender and narrative agency; to place the debates of privacy and publicity within the literal and metaphoric spaces of the nineteenth-century novel. This innovative study will be of interest to scholars of nineteenth-century English and European literature.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Cambridge University Press
• Seitenzahl: 260
• Erscheinungstermin: 31. Mai 2007
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 152mm x 15mm
• Gewicht: 427g
• ISBN-13: 9780521038904
• ISBN-10: 0521038901
• Artikelnr.: 22897132

Autorenporträt

Ann Gaylin is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. She has published articles on Wilkie Collins and Proust. Her articles have appeared in Texas Studies in Literature and Language and The Cincinnati Romance Review.

Inhaltsangabe

Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. I'm all ears: Pride and Prejudice, or the story behind the story
2. Eavesdropping and the gentle art of Persuasion
3. Household words: Balzac's and Dickens's domestic spaces
4. The madwoman outside the attic: eavesdropping and narrative agency in The Woman in White
5. La double entente: eavesdropping and identity in A la recherche du temps perdu
Conclusion: covert listeners and secret agents
Notes
Select bibliography
Index.