Eavesdropping in the Novel from Austen to Proust  

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Eavesdropping in the Novel from Austen to Proust (2003) - Ann Gaylin

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 dramatises 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 innovative study will be of interest to scholars of nineteenth-century English and European literature.

First Sentence: Almost everyone who has read Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights or seen William Wyler's 1939 film version remembers the dramatic scene in which Catherine, unaware of Heathcliff's presence on the other side of the kitchen wall, confides her feelings for him to Nelly. Read the first page

Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): illicit listening, covert listening, double entente, eavesdropping scenes, narrative agency, secret listening

Capitalized Phrases (CAPs):

Sir Percival, Count Fosco, Anne Catherick, Marian Halcombe, Elizabeth Bennet, Walter Hartright, Mme Vauquer, Laura Fairlie, Madame Fosco, Captain Harville, Mme Cibot, Valérie Marneffe, Maison Vauquer, Mlle Vinteuil, Anne Elliot, Captain Wentworth, Lady Russell, Mlle Michonneau, Mme de Villeparisis, Miss Bingley, Miss Tox, Jane Austen, Lord Orville, Emma Woodhouse, Mme de Saint-Estève





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