Frances burney and narrative prior to ideology

""Frances Burney and Narrative Prior to Ideology works between Burney's Journals and Letters and her fiction more thoroughly than any study of her in the past twenty-five years. By doing so, it offers significant reinterpretations of Burney's four novels: Evelina, Cecilia, Camilla, and The Wanderer. It describes Burney's eluding the major modern-isms through which critics have tried to read her: Feminism (with its "gendering" of beauty and reversal of gender roles); Capitalism and its Marxist critique (here the details of Burney's housekeeping become important); Professionalism (as a response to status inconsistency and class conflict); and Ian Watt's "Formal Realism" (Burney perhaps saved the novel from a sharp decline it suffered in the 1770s, even as she tried to distance herself from the genre)." -- Publisher website."
""Ideology" today holds a place in literary criticism much like "ironic tension" in the era of New Criticism and "patriarchal power" in the great surge of Feminist criticism beginning in the 1970s. By showing how its subject eludes the -isms through which she might be read, Frances Burney and Narrative Prior to Ideology reinterprets Burney's place in the history of the English novel and challenges readers who use the word easily."@en