Title: Eavesdropping in the novel from Austen to Proust
First published: 2002
Description: "Eavesdropping in the Novel from Austen to Proust investigates human curiosity and its representation in eavesdropping scenes in nineteenth-century English and French novels. Ann Gaylin argues that eavesdropping dramatizes a primal human urge to know, and offers a paradigm of narrative transmission and reception of information among characters, narrators, and readers. Gaylin sheds light on the social and psychological effects of the nineteenth-century rise of information technology and accelerated flow of information, as manifested in the anxieties about - and delight in - displays of private life and its secrets. Analyzing eavesdropping in Austen, Balzac, Dickens, Collins, and Proust, she demonstrates the flexibility of the scene to produce narrative complication or resolution, to foreground questions of gender and narrative agency, and to place the debate of privacy and publicity within the literal and metaphoric spaces of the nineteenth-century novel. This innovative study will be of interest to scholars of nineteenth-century English and European literature."--Jacket.
Subjects: Comparative Literature, Eavesdropping in literature, English and French, English fiction, French and English, French fiction, History and criticism, Literature, Comparative, Views on eavesdropping, English fiction, history and criticism, French fiction, history and criticism, Comparative literature, english and french, Comparative literature, french and english, Criticism and interpretation, Eavesdropping
People: Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), Jane Austen (1775-1817), Marcel Proust (1871-1922), Wilkie Collins (1824-1889)
Time periods: 19th century
LC classification: PR868.E25 G39 2002