Direction and Diversion: Chapter Titles in Three Mid-Century English Novels by Sarah Fielding, Henry Fielding, and Charlotte Lennox

Birke, Dorothee

doi:10.1353/sec.2012.0005

Cited by 6 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…Readings of David Simple have occasionally focused on more formal issues as well, especially Sarah's irony and rhetoric. By attending respectively to the author's self‐fashioning and to her use of chapter titles, James Kim and Dorothee Birke (2012) argue that David Simple employs “sentimental irony” as an alternative to Henry's satiric irony (Kim) or in combination with it (Birke). Simon Stern (2012) explores the novel's self‐effacing rhetoric by reading it against the background of midcentury copyright law.…”

Section: Sarah Fieldingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Henry and Sarah Fielding: The 2010s in retrospect

Maioli

2021

Literature Compass

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This article provides an overview of studies of Henry and Sarah Fielding since the 2010s, with occasional discussion of earlier sources. These years have given pronounced attention to the Fieldings' responses to material and intellectual contexts: economic, political, and religious crises; empiricist epistemology and science; Lockean theories of education; discourses on gender and sexuality; and the dynamics of the public sphere. Work on aesthetics has reassessed the Fieldings' handling of satire and their attitudes towards both national and international genres. I identify zones of growing consensus as well as persistent disagreement, and I close by noting two unresolved attribution problems and calling for more work on Sarah's influence on Henry.

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Section: Sarah Fieldingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Henry and Sarah Fielding: The 2010s in retrospect

Maioli

2021

Literature Compass

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“…While Haywood’s earlier fiction features no chapter partitions at all, her later novels make use of the Cervantine tradition of circumstantial chapter headings, which Fielding employs as well. As Birke puts it in her analysis of Cervantine chapter headings, ‘some [intertitles] do seem calculated to convey an adequate idea of a chapter’s contents, others appear as ironical, superfluous, mysterious, or self-contradictory’ (Birke, 2012: 211). In other words, they tend to challenge the Cooperative Principle, not only because they prefigure events in the story, but also because they violate various other maxims.…”

Section: Prolepsis: Flouting the Maxim Of Mannermentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The common features of Haywood’s chapter headings are that they ‘negotiate issues of authorial control’ (see Birke, 2012: 218) and that they do what III: Chapter 21 promises in general terms: ‘Presents the reader with some prognostics on events in futuro ’ (Haywood, 1998: 461). They serve as proleptic tools, giving readers a glimpse of what is to come in a narrative.…”

Section: Prolepsis: Flouting the Maxim Of Mannermentioning

confidence: 99%

Flouting figures: Uncooperative narration in the fiction of Eliza Haywood

Kukkonen

2013

Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics

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Eliza Haywood’s narrators often display what could be termed ‘uncooperative narration’ in that they defy the smooth course that fictional narration is supposed to take, and claim to be unable to narrate strongly emotional states (in Love in Excess, 2000; first published 1719) or precipitate readers’ reactions to future events (in The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, 1998; first published 1751). Haywood’s strategies of uncooperative narration are based on rhetorical figures which flout the cooperative principle underlying human communication according to Grice: the denial of narration, adynaton, flouts the maxim of quantity; the time-based playing with readers’ meaning-making, prolepsis, flouts the maxim of manner. This article will develop an account of uncooperative narration on the basis of Gricean pragmatics (Grice, 1989) and Tomasello’s work on communication and cooperation in human evolution (Tomasello, 2008), which extends the traditional narratological focus on unreliable narration. Uncooperative narration challenges readers to find the communicative purpose behind flouting figures like adynaton and prolepsis, contributes to the characterisation of the narrator and, in Eliza Haywood’s fiction, often holds up a mirror to readers themselves.

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“…This combination suggests an affinity to conduct literature 9 The narratological distinction between the level of the paratext and that of the main body of the text should not preclude the treatment of such paratextual elements as chapter titles in the case of authorial narration: one important element of the '(re)produc[tion] of the structural and functional situation of authorship' (Lanser, 1992, p. 16) in these novels is the suggestion that the narrative voice is that of the person responsible for or at least involved in selection (sometimes also invention/creation) and editorial arrangement of the textual elements. 10 For a discussion of the function of chapter titles in mid-eighteenth-century English fiction, in particular the novels by S. Fielding and Lennox, see Birke (2012). I argue there that chapter titles are frequently used to juxtapose different narrative styles and thus heighten the sense that the title is a playful commentary on the text -a similar technique is employed in Charlotte Lennox' The Female Quixote and, even more strikingly, in Sarah Fielding's The History of David Simple.…”

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confidence: 99%

Narrative Concepts in the Study of Eighteenth-Century Literature

Mäkikalli¹,

Steinby²

2017

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The series from the Turku Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (TUCEMEMS) publishes monographs and collective volumes placed at the intersection of disciplinary boundaries, introducing fresh connections between established fields of study. The series especially welcomes research combining or juxtaposing different kinds of primary sources and new methodological solutions to deal with problems presented by them. Encouraged themes and approaches include, but are not limited to, identity formation in medieval/early modern communities, and the analysis of texts and other cultural products as a communicative process comprising shared symbols and meanings. Series Editor Matti Peikola, University of Turku, FinlandNarrative Concepts in the Study of Eighteenth-Century Literature Edited by Liisa Steinby and Aino MäkikalliAmsterdam University Press Some rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, any part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise).Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher. Peritextual Disposition in French Eighteenth-Century Narratives 289Teemu Ikonen (University of Tampere) List of Abbreviations 309Index 311 Illustration 1 275 Illustration 2 276 Illustration 3 283 Illustration 4 285 List of Illustrations IntroductionThe Place of Narratology in the Historical Study of Eighteenth-Century Literature Liisa Steinby and Aino MäkikalliDefinierbar ist nur das, was keine Geschichte hat. (Nietzsche) 1 Narratological concepts, such as focalization, perspective, implied author, the distinction between story and discourse, and even homo-and heterodiegetic narration, today belong to the toolkit of scholars of literature, including those who do not consider themselves narratologists. Since literary analysis almost always also encompasses formal aspects of works, narratological concepts concerning the structure and forms of a narrative are taken by many as a 'natural' choice. Narratologists did not originally see their work as 'a handmaiden to interpretation'; their theoretically-based taxonomic description of narrative was separated from interpretation, which always also has to do with the content of the narrative (Herman, 2008, p. 30). However, while there are those, even today, who want to keep narratology 'uncontaminated' by other approaches (see, e.g., Kindt, 2009), most narratologists now welcome attempts to combine narratological conceptualization with a whole range of different approaches in contemporary literary scholarship (see, e.g., Nünning, 2009). We can therefore speak of a rapprochement between the narratological analysis of narrative forms and various approaches which stress cultural and historical contextualization in interpretations of literature....

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Direction and Diversion: Chapter Titles in Three Mid-Century English Novels by Sarah Fielding, Henry Fielding, and Charlotte Lennox

Cited by 6 publications

References 14 publications

Henry and Sarah Fielding: The 2010s in retrospect

Henry and Sarah Fielding: The 2010s in retrospect

Flouting figures: Uncooperative narration in the fiction of Eliza Haywood

Narrative Concepts in the Study of Eighteenth-Century Literature

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