Eavesdropping in the Novel from Austen to Proust

In this 2003 book, Ann Gaylin investigates scenes of eavesdropping in nineteenth-century English and French novels.

Ann Gaylin (Author)

9780521038904, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 16 August 2007

260 pages, 1 b/w illus.
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm, 0.394 kg

'… surprises by the abundance of its examples and frequently impresses by the cogency of its analysis …' Modernism/Modernity

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. Analysing eavesdropping in Austen, Balzac, Collins, Dickens and Proust, Gaylin demonstrates the flexibility of the scene to produce narrative complication or resolution; to foreground questions of gender and narrative agency; to place the debates of privacy and publicity within the literal and metaphoric spaces of the nineteenth-century novel. This 2003 study will be of interest to scholars of nineteenth-century English and European literature.

Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. I'm all ears: Pride and Prejudice, or the story behind the story
2. Eavesdropping and the gentle art of Persuasion
3. Household words: Balzac's and Dickens's domestic spaces
4. The madwoman outside the attic: eavesdropping and narrative agency in The Woman in White
5. La double entente: eavesdropping and identity in A la recherche du temps perdu
Conclusion: covert listeners and secret agents
Notes
Select bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]