Abstract
This essay brings together cognitive literary theory and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogic imagination to illuminate the construction of social class in the eighteenth-century novel. It offers a close reading of selected passages from Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778), made possible by combining Bakhtinian and cognitive poetics. It also discusses the theoretical ramifications of this approach and demonstrates its use in an undergraduate classroom.
Highlights
I have learned to nod sympathetically when my undergraduates, after reading the first fifty or so pages of Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778), tell me that they find it flowery and wordy
I nod even though a part of me imagines asking them, with some indignation: Frances Burney’s novel is flowery and wordy? As opposed to what? What are you reading currently, compared to which Evelina is not well written enough for you? But even as one part of me fumes, another remains optimistic. This is my opening, I say to myself. They will see that what they currently describe as flowery is ideology wed to rhetoric with skill, subtlety, and precision
Roughly two weeks later, we come across a passage in which one of Evelina’s suitors, a “low-bred”1 young man, Mr Smith, who yet wishes to come across as a gentleman, presents her with tickets to a ball at the Hampstead Assembly
Summary
If we want to do better, one good place to start is Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia. In Bakhtin’s view, are constructed “out of heteroglot, multi-voiced, multi-styled and often multi-languaged elements.” One of the “compositional-stylistic unities” (though by no means the most important one) making up “the novelistic whole” is the “stylistically individualized speech of characters.” Burney was not on Bakhtin’s radar when he wrote Discourse in the Novel (unlike, for instance, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Tobias Smollett), her writing seems to exemplify what he called a comic style “of the English sort”: one based on “the stratification of the common language.” The “verbally and semantically autonomous” ways in which Burney’s characters speak underscore their largely immutable class positions It is heteroglossia in service of ideology.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
