Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- Introduction. Visuality in Profile
- 1 Jane Austen's Aesthetic Vocabulary of Character
- 2 Ann Radcliffe's Gothic Reconstructions of Female Identity and Experience
- 3 The Gendered Gaze and ‘Made-up’ Women in Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent, Ennui and Belinda
- 4 Optical Allusions in Frances Burney's Evelina and The Wanderer
- Conclusion
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
Introduction. Visuality in Profile
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 January 2018
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- Introduction. Visuality in Profile
- 1 Jane Austen's Aesthetic Vocabulary of Character
- 2 Ann Radcliffe's Gothic Reconstructions of Female Identity and Experience
- 3 The Gendered Gaze and ‘Made-up’ Women in Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent, Ennui and Belinda
- 4 Optical Allusions in Frances Burney's Evelina and The Wanderer
- Conclusion
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
Summary
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:
Words, when well chosen, have so great a Force in them, that a Description often gives us more lively Ideas than the Sight of Things themselves. The Reader finds a Scene drawn in stronger Colours, and painted more to the Life in his Imagination, by the help of Words, than by an actual Survey of the Scene which they describe. In this case the Poet seems to get the better of Nature.
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:
What I understand by manners, then, is a culture's buzz of implication. I mean the whole evanescent context which is made up of half- uttered or un- uttered or unutterable expressions of value. They are hinted at by small actions, sometimes by the arts of dress or decoration, sometimes by tone, gesture, emphasis, or rhythm, sometimes by the words that are used with a special frequency or a special meaning.
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- Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2017