Eighteenth Century Influences on Jane Austen's Early Fiction

The first book taking a New Historicist approach to how the Gothic writing of Ann Radcliffe and the novels of Fanny Burney helped to shape Jane Austen's literary endeavors.

This scholarly text, suitable for graduates and undergraduates alike, examines how the Gothic writing of Ann Radcliffe and the eighteenth-century novels of Fanny Barney helped to shape and hone Jane Austen's own eighteenth century literary endeavors.

It specifically focuses on Austen's early works "Northanger Abbey", "Lady Susan", and "Sense and Sensibility", all of which were conceived and shaped during the last decade of the 1700's.

This study closely follows the manner in which Austen eschewed the popular epistolary genre in favour of the novel-form, how she mastered the parodic-Gothic form, and created characters that while uniquely hers owed a great deal to the late-eighteenth century English milieu of which they have become major cultural elements.