Portraiture and architecture are often interconnected surfaces of the self in Jane Austen's use of visuality. Both have the power to convey the way in which characters’ shifting perspectives reorient their prejudices and lead to marriages based on compatible views and values. Drawing upon David Lodge's theory that the ‘vocabulary of discrimination’ allows for a categorical means of communication through a language within language, my discussion moves from two- to three- dimensional forms of aesthetic representation in her fiction. The analysis focuses on Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1815), which best demonstrate the novelist's manipulation of the gaze and correlatives of character.

After contextualizing Austen's visual technique, the chapter first examines her novels’ reliance on the physiognomic qualities of the likeness to compel the viewer, and thus the reader, to picture the subject differently. Unlike Ann Radcliffe, whose references to portraits show the permanence of female subjection, Austen uses the ‘likeness’ as a positive force for change in her plots: visible and metaphorical portraits improve characters’ insights into themselves and others through perceptual substitution, or the replacement of one image with another, that inspires a change of heart. Like Radcliffe, however, Austen discriminates between the male and female experience of viewing and being viewed. While the painted male gaze has the power to ‘arrest’ the heroine's eyes and heart, the heroine cannot control a male viewer's way of looking and feeling. The reader observes that in contrast to Austen's fictional women, who require visible portraits to alter their perceptions of men, her heroes must be able to ‘picture’ a woman's character in their mind's eye.

Society's absorption of the Lavaterian habit of looking and René Descartes's philosophy that ‘the eyes of the body reify the eye of the mind’ anticipate the connection between portraiture and architecture, which comprises the second half of my analysis. Like portraiture, architecture provides characters with an external means of identification. By imbuing the physiognomies of structures and their surroundings with comparisons to the Aristotelian golden mean, Austen reasserts the early eighteenth century's investment in looks that speak.

If adventures will not befall a young woman in her own village, she must seek them abroad.’ And with Northanger Abbey's opening axiom echoing in my mind, I set out from the Highlands of Denver to explore visuality and its intriguing inherence in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century British women's novels. Visuality, which functions as a continuum linking visual and verbal modes of communication and understanding, empowered women novelists at a time when selfexpression was particularly constrained for their sex, allowing them to control the gaze and speak through pictures. My analysis of the novels of Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth and Frances Burney demonstrates that visuality provided them with a coded methodology capable of depicting and negotiating the ways in which women ‘should’ see, appear and think in a society in which the reputation was image based.

I have relished writing a book that offers fresh insights into a particularly beguiling chapter in British literature. My research unfolded in a small, teastocked room in St Andrews that though draughty, featured a mesmerizing view of the mercurial North Sea, with its frothy tempests and righteous rainbows. Like the Scottish weather, my doctoral studies were a subject of total immersion and the substance of which novels are made. My quest for understanding the dynamics between the visual and the verbal, the ‘seeable’ and the describable in women's novels published between 1778 and 1815 prompted productive pilgrimages to a number of key destinations: Chawton House Library, Jane Austen's House Museum, the Wallace Collection, the Royal Academy of Arts, the National Portrait Gallery, the British Museum, the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, the Bodleian Libraries, King's College (Cambridge) Library, Blenheim Palace, King's Lynn, the Musée Jacquemart- André, the Château de Malmaison and even Buckingham Palace. Perhaps nothing could have surpassed the thrill of speaking at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge's Pride and Prejudice bicentenary conference, which culminated in a proper Regency ball led by renowned dance master Stuart Marsden.

I am thankful for the scholars, writers, artists and actors who, directly or indirectly, knowingly or unknowingly, helped me find my path – a path that straddles literature, art, strategic communications and international relations.

At the opening of Jane Austen's ‘The Mystery’, Corydon halts a conversation before one has begun, exclaiming, ‘But Hush! I am interrupted.’ The threepage ‘UNFINISHED COMEDY’ highlights the role of unfinished sentences that shift from verbal to visual modes of expression. Austen spells out ‘the mystery’ only once, not through dialogue but rather through the inaudible act of speech. Whereas the reader of the playlet sees the script, the spectator reads it from the actors’ countenances. Drawing upon the interplay between well- chosen words and visual communication, the novelist dramatizes the enduring influence of what Joseph Addison decreed in the Spectator nearly a century before:

According to Addison's theory and Austen's burlesque, a well- crafted, even if undetailed, verbal sketch has the potential to theatricize in the mind's eye what complete visual impressions would limit, enhancing the view beyond the reality. Novels, more than drama, compel the reader to ‘see’ the images that he or she paints in the mind's eye from the text that appears on the printed page, allowing the aesthetic functioning of descriptions to produce a more lively impression in the imagination than sight alone could offer.

Lionel Trilling's landmark essay ‘Manners, Morals, and the Novel’ (1961) proposes that ‘well- chosen’ words are as much in dialogue with manners as they are with their linguistic roots:

The notion of place could be considered relatively simple in Joyce's writing, given that his major works – Dubliners, Portrait, Ulysses, and even, in a sense, Finnegans Wake – all take place in the city of Dublin, Ireland. But as Michael Seidel indicates in the title of his study of Ulysses, geography and travel in Joyce's work also have an epic dimension. The concept of place therefore signifies a variety of issues, and arguably two of the most worthy of consideration are the ecological and the political. Attention to the role of nature and environment in Irish literary works has been growing since the publication of Tim Wenzell's Emerald Green: An Ecocritical Study of Irish Literature in 2009, although that work pays considerably more attention to such Joyce contemporaries as Yeats, Lady Gregory, George Moore, and A. E. than to Joyce himself. However, with the growing prominence of ecological study in the field of literature, attention to its significance in Joyce's work will continue to grow. I will therefore offer a survey of moments in Joyce's fictions in which the natural world as a setting plays a role, beginning with the poems of Chamber Music. Stephen Dedalus's encounters with nature in Portrait and Ulysses also deserve attention, as does Molly Bloom's monologue at the end of Ulysses and its echo in ALP's conversation at the end of Finnegans Wake. The coastal nature of Ireland makes the sea an important figure in many of these moments, and yet it is the urban spaces of the city and their effects on human activity that ultimately dominate the role of place in Dubliners, Portrait, and Ulysses, if not Finnegans Wake. Ireland's geography therefore has not only ecological but also political implications. Its structure as an island with bounded and therefore constrained space made it vulnerable to emigration, particularly after such an epic disaster as the Great Famine produced by the potato blight of the mid-nineteenth century. The Dubliners story “Eveline” glosses a version of the emigration dilemmas produced by Irish poverty in the twentieth century, although a play such as Joyce's Exiles offers a rather different perspective on Irish emigration and return.

There may be occasional funny moments in Dubliners and Portrait, but we would hardly think of either work as comic. Indeed, “A Painful Case” does not mislead with its title, for the story of a failed romance that leads to the possibly suicidal death of a woman and the anguished regrets of a man is profoundly sad. The struggles of young Stephen Dedalus in Portrait surely evoke compassion and concern, not laughter. Yet the designation comic is certainly appropriate for Ulysses, as Zack Bowen's 1989 “Ulysses” as a Comic Novel makes clear, and, we can argue, for Finnegans Wake as well, even though these later works also resound with many other emotional conflicts. Joyce's works give readers palettes of many moods, and these, in turn, are produced by the myriad voices that tell his stories in myriad styles. Indeed, Joyce's stylistic experimentation over the course of his writing has become a signature feature of his contribution to modernist literature. In its variety, its differences, its complexity, the multitude of ways he makes the language of his fictions expressive becomes almost overwhelming. When it comes to style, it may seem as though the ordinary has effectively been put aside, though this is far more evident in the later works – Ulysses and Finnegans Wake – than in the more conventional narrations of Dubliners and Portrait. Yet the ordinary has not disappeared entirely. In Ulysses style and voice begin relatively conventionally by remaining in the background at first, only to move more and more to the foreground, drawing as much attention to the way in which things are told as to the actions, events, and conflicts in the episodes themselves. An episode such as “Nausicaa” has characters, actions, and conflict, to be sure, but they are narrated by such a peculiar voice that it takes us a moment to understand that the first section is telling us about Gerty MacDowell's evening on the beach with her friends in the style in which she would wish her story to be told if it were written, using the conventions of style and diction of the romance novel. In other words, it is a “popular” or more ordinary literary style that tells the events, and the experimentation lies not in the complexity of the language but in the complex role of imitation and possible parody.

Richard Ellmann said it best: “Joyce's discovery, so humanistic that he would have been embarrassed to disclose it out of context, was that the ordinary is the extraordinary.” How so? Is there anything extraordinary about depicting a man going to the outhouse in the morning and defecating, pleased to find “that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone” (4.508)? Surely the act is commonplace enough, but its depiction in a 1904 novel, complete with the quiet thoughts that accompany it, is not. It suggests that even the most insignificant moments of a day can have meaning to human beings, and their representation in literature sharpens its realism to an extraordinary degree. In a 1920 letter to Carlo Linati, Joyce called Ulysses “the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day (life).” The representation of the ordinary thereby becomes one of the most important elements of Joyce's democratic impulse. By giving the figures of Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses a keen specificity with respect to the banal activities and feelings of their everyday lives, he intensifies the vitality of what it means to be human. The ordinary therefore plays a number of important roles in Joyce's fiction, notwithstanding its complication by the perspectives produced by narration and the thoughts of its characters. Its most external manifestation can be found in the intimate connection between many of the settings in the works and their prototypes in the historical world of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Dublin. This reminds us that Joyce's work belongs to the realm of Irish literature, with an emphasis on what sets Dublin apart from cities in English literature. Number 7 Eccles Street, the home of the Blooms, remains a historical address in the northern part of the city, and tourists can still visit the James Joyce House, which is located at 15 Usher's Island, the home of the Morkan sisters in “The Dead.” These places now enjoy a special literary significance for tourists and Dubliners alike, but in 1904 they were ordinary addresses, ordinary buildings and homes. Critics have inevitably followed Joyce's own description of Dublin as “the centre of paralysis” by emphasizing the metaphorical qualities of the place, as when Hugh Kenner writes in Dublin's Joyce that the city in its present paralysis “remains a ghost, not a heap of bones.”

Classical literature could well be considered to offer the opposite of the ordinariness of daily life, with its focus on events of great importance with significant implications for the welfare and fate of nations and cultures. Joyce's Ulysses, with its many allusions to the activities and texture of ordinary life previously discussed, is simultaneously structured on the narrative events of Homer's epic Odyssey, a device already evoked in the earlier A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. There Joyce complicates the identity of young Stephen with that unconventional name, for an Irishman, of Dedalus. By connecting Stephen to the Greek myth of Daedalus and Icarus, Joyce extends the story of oppressive life on an island from modern Ireland to ancient Crete, and traces the ambition (and failure) of artists to fly across the waters to freer environments back to classical mythology. For scholars of literary history the classical frameworks of Portrait and Ulysses made Joyce one of the premier figures of early twentieth-century Modernism as a movement. Beginning with T. E. Hulme's 1911 essay on “Romanticism and Classicism,” such Modernists as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot embraced the concept of Classicism as a modernist principle. Their focus was largely stylistic, urging clean, dry, objective, precise language both in poetry and in prose rather than emotional flights of Romantic aesthetic excess. But Modernists also incorporated classical themes into their poetry and fiction, with Ulysses as a premier example. The thematic analogues to various events and adventures in the Homeric epic are of course programmed into the titles of the episodes that Joyce revealed to Carlo Linati, even though they are not listed as chapter titles in the book. Their function is, once again, to enlarge and enhance the story of ordinary and mundane life on a Thursday in Dublin by making it resonate with epic and heroic adventures. Classical mythology is not Joyce's only fictional intertext, however, and the democratic impulse that spurs his focus on ordinary life in his works also extends to what we now call “popular culture” – the panoply of media productions that ordinary citizens encounter in the course of their daily experiences. The title of Ulysses may have been inspired by Homer's Odyssey, but Finnegans Wake alludes to the popular Irish ballad that recounts the death and resurrection of a fallen man.

James Joyce is one of the most challenging and difficult writers in the English language, highly respected as “the epitome of a high modernist, an artist for and of the cultural elite,” as Brandon Kershner put it. Yet ironically he is also one of the most popular – not only among academics, but also among many common readers. The iconic image to make this point is, of course, the 1955 Eve Arnold photograph of Marilyn Monroe, dressed in a chaste bathing suit in a children's playground, reading a copy of Joyce's Ulysses. This was not a stunt, we learned from Richard Brown, who interviewed the photographer. Monroe told Arnold that she had been reading the book for a long time. “She said she loved the sound of it and would read it aloud to herself to try to make sense of it – but she found it hard going.” One can only wish that Monroe could have enjoyed access to one of the many Ulysses reading groups that have sprung up not only in the United States but also in many other countries in recent decades. Mary Lowe-Evans writes of this Joyce community of varied readers: “Economists, musicologists, physicians, clergymen and women, literary scholars, linguists, students, and housewives engage in lively debate about Joyce's work with soldiers, sailors, architects, and attorneys.” The curious ability to fascinate both high-brow academics and ordinary readers is an important quality of Joyce's work – important because it speaks to a major aspect of its value as art with a remarkably democratic impulse. Sylvia Beach is reported to have said that Joyce himself “treated everyone as an equal, whether they were writers, children, waiters, princesses or charladies.” Joyce resists hierarchical judgments, whether in classifying people according to wealth, status, culture, intelligence, or even virtue, or in selecting thematic and stylistic vehicles for presenting their fictional lives. His strategy was to pursue forms of diversity in most aspects of his writing in order to balance thematic profundity with banality and stylistic aestheticism with commonalities of speech. This democratic tendency is evident in the multiplicity of his characters, the richness and depth of their exploration by the texts, the political and ethical implications in the historical moments of their settings, the inclusion of both the highest and lowest cultural expressions, and the generic and stylistic proliferation found in the works.