| My dissertation, "Frances Burney's Novels: A Study of a Developing Genre," places Burney's novels in their historical, social, and cultural contexts in order to discover how Burney adapts the basic form of the domestic, or feminine, novel to meet Burney's increasing need to see social injustices remedied. Burney experiments with the form and content of the feminine novel, generally considered conservative in nature, to promote the changes that she deems necessary for female survival in a patriarchal society. Burney's novels, Evelina, Or, A Young Lady's Entrance into Society (1778), Cecilia, Or Memoirs of an Heiress (1782), Camilla, Or A Picture of Youth (1796), and The Wanderer; Or, Female Difficulties (1814), demonstrate a concern with issues of feminine education, economics, and guardianship.;Further, I discuss the simultaneous evolution of the critical review as a literary genre and its subsequent impact on the reading audience through the reviews of Burney's novels; the review, like the novel, was in its relative infancy during the long eighteenth century. As Burney's final novels, Camilla and The Wanderer, become more experimental in both form and content, the reviewers fail to embrace these novels, particularly The Wanderer, in any meaningful fashion. The reviewers in no way acknowledge the contribution these novels make to the development of the genre as the reviewers become increasingly more critical of novels that go against the grain of the reviewers' conservative views in maintaining the status quo of the patriarchal establishment.;My study is significant to literary research as it demonstrates the evolution of the feminine novel and the evolution of the critical review during the final quarter of the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Through this study of Burney's novels, the evolution of both genres is clearly seen as a microcosm of developments that were occurring generally in the British novel, particularly in areas of realism/naturalism and narration. My study of Burney's novels potentially opens the door to a larger study of canon (re)formation and the reappropriation of previously understudied texts, which have critical merit but received mediocre to poor reviews upon their publication, in determining a twenty-first century perspective of the eighteenth-century canon of novels. |
