Overview
- Traces the publication history of Burney’s first and most successful novel from 1778 to the present
- Examines the evolution of paratextual apparatus and its role in shaping readers’ experience and book’s positioning on the market
- Discusses visual presentation of the novel and use of fashion in illustrations as marketing devices
Part of the book series: New Directions in Book History (NDBH)
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Table of contents (9 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
Evelina, the first novel by Frances Burney, published in 1778, enjoys lasting popularity among the reading public. Tracing its publication history through 174 editions, adaptations, and reprints, many of them newly discovered and identified, this book demonstrates how the novel’s material embodiment in the form of the printed book has been reshaped by its publishers, recasting its content for new generations of readers. Four main chapters vividly describe how during 240 years, Evelina, a popular novel of manners, metamorphosed without any significant alterations to its text into a Regency “rambling” text, a romantic novel for “lecteurs délicats,” a cheap imprint for circulating libraries, a yellow-back, a book with a certain aesthetic cachet, a Christmas gift-book, finally becoming an integral part of the established literary canon in annotated scholarly editions. This book also focuses on the remodelling and transformation of the paratext in this novel, writtenby a woman author, by the heavily male-dominated publishing industry. Shorter Entr’acte sections discuss and describe alterations in the forms of Burney’s name and the title of her work, the omission and renaming of her authorial prefaces, and the redeployment of the publisher’s prefatorial apparatus to support particular editions throughout almost two-and-a-half centuries of the novel’s existence. Illustrated with reproductions of covers, frontispieces, and title pages, the book also provides an illuminating insight into the role of Evelina’s visual representation in its history as a marketable commodity, highlighting the existence of editions targeting various segments of the book market: from the upper-middle-class to mass-readership. The first comprehensive and fully updated bibliography of English and translated editions, adaptations, and reprints of Evelina published in 13 languages and scripts appears in an appendix.
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Frances Burney’s “Evelina”
Book Subtitle: The Book, its History, and its Paratext
Authors: Svetlana Kochkina
Series Title: New Directions in Book History
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17797-2
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-17796-5Published: 15 April 2023
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-031-17799-6Published: 15 April 2024
eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-17797-2Published: 12 April 2023
Series ISSN: 2634-6117
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6125
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XXXIII, 285
Number of Illustrations: 20 b/w illustrations
Topics: Eighteenth-Century Literature, Literature and Technology/Media, History of the Book, Printing and Publishing