Overview

McMaster's lively study looks at the various codes by which Eighteenth-century novelists made the minds of their characters legible through their bodies. She tellingly explores the discourses of medicine, physiognomy, gesture and facial expression, completely familiar to contemporary readers but not to us, in ways that enrich our reading of such classics as Clarissa and Tristram Shandy , as well as of novels by Fanny Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen.

Full Product Details

9781349516469

Table of Contents

Reviews

'Offering insight into the ways in which eighteenth-century novelists expected their readers to draw on common understandings about expression, gesture and character, this is a lively and useful study.' - Times Literary Supplement 'McMaster productively alerts us to the rich languages of the body in the eighteenth century by both parsing out their antecedents and illuminating the prevalence of expressive bodies in the novelistic tradition.' - Tita Chico, Eighteenth-Century Studies

'Offering insight into the ways in which eighteenth-century novelists expected their readers to draw on common understandings about expression, gesture and character, this is a lively and useful study.' - Times Literary Supplement 'McMaster productively alerts us to the rich languages of the body in the eighteenth century by both parsing out their antecedents and illuminating the prevalence of expressive bodies in the novelistic tradition.' - Tita Chico, Eighteenth-Century Studies

Author Information

JULIET McMASTER is University Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta, Canada. She is the author of Thackeray: The Major Novels, Jane Austen on Love and Jane Austen the Novelist, Trollope's Palliser Novels and Dickens the Designer, co-author of The Novel from Sterne to James, and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available