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From Charlotte Smith to Jane Austen: The Evolution of the English Novel

  • Larissa Kinach EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: June 7, 2023
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Abstract

The article focuses on two female writers from the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century: Charlotte Smith and Jane Austen. Based on Smith’s first novel Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle (1788) and Austen’s Emma (1815), the novel’s evolutionary trajectory from prose fiction at the end of the eighteenth century to the full flowering of the realist novel will be traced in an exemplary fashion. Thereby, the analysis will argue that Emmeline represents a case of transition in which subjective modes of storytelling (literary conventions, character perspective) have not yet been synthetically combined with the objectifying framework of the narrative situation. Finally, this has been achieved with the realist novel as will be demonstrated with Emma.


Corresponding author: Larissa Kinach, MA, English Department, University of Tübingen, Wilhelmstr. 50, 72074 Tübingen, Germany, E-mail:

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Published Online: 2023-06-07
Published in Print: 2023-06-27

© 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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