Austen’s Unbecoming Conjunctions

Heydt-Stevenson, Jillian

doi:10.1007/978-1-137-09853-5

Cited by 28 publications

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“…The "large fat sighings" and "comfortable, substantial size" of Mrs Musgrove, as ridiculed by the narrator, which may strike modern readers as fatshaming, is an unusually harsh joke in Austen's works. The joke about changes in physical appearance has drawn fierce criticism and is considered to be a "savage caricature" (Mudrick, 1952: 212) [14] , or "infamous proclamation" (Heydt-Stevenson, 2005: 183) [15] , among others.…”

Section: The Criticism Of the Jokementioning

confidence: 99%

“Large fat sighings” of a “large bulky figure”: Identity-building and formation of new order in Persuasion

Zhang

Wei

2023

SHS Web Conf.

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This essay provides a multifaceted analysis of Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion through the lens of narrative consciousness, rhythm and sexual anxiety. Drawing on Lacanian theory, it examines the selfidentification processes of the heroine Anne Elliot and Mrs Musgrove against, and with relation to patriarchal norms. By analyzing the dynamics presented in Mrs Musgrove’s “large fat sighings”, the essay explores the effect of incongruity between the human body and spirit; and it further examines Mrs Musgrove’s Sphinx-like figure, who inspires desire and inhibitions in the Oedipus-like Captain Wentworth with a significant impact on the formation of community and order. The essay investigates long-neglected subjects presented in Austen’s novels and enriches the complex portrait of Mrs. Musgrove as both Mother and Sphinx.

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Section: The Criticism Of the Jokementioning

confidence: 99%

“Large fat sighings” of a “large bulky figure”: Identity-building and formation of new order in Persuasion

Zhang

Wei

2023

SHS Web Conf.

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“…Jillian HeydtStevenson argues that Henry's "history lesson" also conveniently elides the violence English citizens and particularly wives were subject to, while Catherine's subsequent musings on the likelihood that Gothic violence only occurs in exoticized, foreign space evidence her inability to forget. 48 Thus novel reading and reflection catalyze Catherine's nascent, politicized adult consciousness.…”

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confidence: 99%

Female Quixotism Refashioned: Northanger Abbey , the Engaged Reader, and the Woman Writer

Wyett¹

2015

ecy

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Though there are certainly many examples of gently parodied male quixotes in eighteenth-century letters and life, from Henry Fielding's Parson Adams to Horace Walpole's depiction of himself as a reader, the figure of the female quixote seems almost exclusively associated with uncritical, overly absorptive novel reading. 1 A 1798 essay, "On the Reading of Novels," in The Monthly Visitor and Pocket Companion sums up contemporary anti-novel discourse with its contention that most novels "have a tendency to mislead the mind, to enfeeble the heart, to represent nature in improper colours, to excite, rather than to suppress, in the young and ardent, romantic notions of love, and to lead the unwary amidst the winding mazes of intrigue, and the flowery fields of dissipation." Furthermore, "females, in general, are the most inclined to peruse them, and from a fatal inattention to their education, they are the most likely to fall victims to their baneful insinuations." 2 Such anti-novel discourse was so widespread by the end of the eighteenth century as to be a cliché.Yet women wrote most of the female quixote characters in later eighteenthand early nineteenth-century novels. At this time when novels were considered a primarily feminized phenomenon, however problematically, women writers had important stakes in legitimating the act of absorptive reading, the reading of novels, and women's reading in general. Professional writers keen to have their books read, whether for fame, profit, or both, were invested in the kind of reader who could both lose herself in the text and distance herself from the intellectual incapacity such absorbed reading purportedly caused. Examining the deployment of the female quixote as a significant mark of literary professionalism, I argue that women who were avowed readers of prose fiction and professional novelists created complex quixotic fictions in recognition of the novel's power. The figure of the female quixote proved particularly poignant

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Becoming Somebody: Refashioning the Body Politic in Mary Robinson’s Nobody

Robinson¹

2020

Fashion and Authorship

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Austen’s Unbecoming Conjunctions

Cited by 28 publications

References 0 publications

“Large fat sighings” of a “large bulky figure”: Identity-building and formation of new order in Persuasion

“Large fat sighings” of a “large bulky figure”: Identity-building and formation of new order in Persuasion

Female Quixotism Refashioned: Northanger Abbey , the Engaged Reader, and the Woman Writer

Becoming Somebody: Refashioning the Body Politic in Mary Robinson’s Nobody

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