evenNorthanger Abbey’sCatherine Morland can be persuaded to recognize the geographic and temporalboundaries of the Gothic novels she loves
Another test to run with R!
7 Matching Annotations
- Oct 2017
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lti.hypothesislabs.com lti.hypothesislabs.com
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The catalyst forthe novel, however, seems to have been a straightforward reaction to a newwork by an author Austen considered her competition*the Scottish MaryBrunton’sDiscipline(1814).Disciplineis a fictional autobiography with the strong religious themes ofsin, repentance and redemption.
The author claims here that Emma was inspired by the 1814 novel Discipline by Mary Brunton, which surely is not part of the male literary canon laid out earlier in the article. The author outlines the main themes of Discipline and explains the relationship between the two authors.
I feel like a broken record here, but again, this seems to be a very tenuous point without computational analysis. The author's own language belies this tenuousness as she says that the novel's inspiration "seems to have been a straightforward reaction" to another novel. The word "seems" does not inspire confidence.
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The figure of the Quixote*from the seventeenth-century Don Quixote of la Mancha to Emma’s namesake Emma Bovary*isessential to the development and evolution of the novel as a genre, promotingthe self-reflexivity, promiscuous intergeneric and intrageneric allusion, andmeditations on realism and reality that are the genre’s hallmarks
Another test to run - Emma as compared to other quixotic novels, especially The Female Quixote!
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Inthe first, Emma uses the fact of Harriet Smith’s illegitimacy as a springboardfor the birth-mystery plot beloved of sentimental novelists.
Another possible tie for DH work - running comparisons on these sentimental novels and Emma.
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Charlotte Lennox’sTheFemale Quixote(1752) and even Eaton Stannard Barrett’sThe Heroine(1813) arecases in point.
I would like to perform quantitative analysis on Emma and these texts, in addition to other 18th century texts such as Evelina.
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Emmais unique in Austen’s adult oeuvre in its obsession not only withother texts, but with the unspecific stock elements of the eighteenth-centuryand Romantic-era novel.
Once again, here is another point that I believe it could almost be irresponsible to make without quantitative analysis. I don't know that it is empirically true that Emma is "unique" in its "obsession" with other texts and "stock elements of the eighteenth-century and Romantic-era novel."
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The Romantic concept of literary influence, articulated in its present-dayincarnation by Harold Bloom, must expand to encompass not only the work ofwomen, but also the work of both canonical and extra-canonical writers, if itis to be of any help in assessing Jane Austen’s work as a critical reader, anda critical rewriter. ‘‘
I believe that DH work could be instrumental in accomplishing this vision. Since the literature of this time is in the public domain, it is indeed possible to run tests of influence and similarity on all existing manuscripts.
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