Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Stephanie Insley Hershinow

Titel

The Limits of Familiarity: Authorship and Romantic Readers by Lindsay Eckert, and: Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës by Devoney Looser (review)

Ist Teil von

• Eighteenth - Century Studies, 2023-09, Vol.57 (1), p.107-111

Ort / Verlag

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2023

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Project MUSE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The two books under consideration in this review tackle these questions via different genres and at different scales. Here, we see connections to other time-honored issues of scholarly concern (sincerity and authenticity, sympathy, sensibility, for example), but the book's focus on familiarity—pardon the pun—defamiliarizes these old scholarly saws. Chapter 1, focusing on Charlotte Smith and William Wordsworth, showcases Eckert's melding of savvy formalist analysis and diligent book history. Throughout her book, Eckert brackets the representation of familiarity within the diegesis of novels (though an early reference to Austen's Mrs. Elton illustrates overfamiliarity's dangers well); instead, she turns our attention to authors' management of their personas through their writing, including, as with Hazlitt, the management (and mismanagement) of stand-in figures in texts that may provide one genealogy for contemporary autofiction.