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The Beginning and Early Middle of Persuasion; or, Form and Ideology in Austen's Experiment with Narrative Comedy

Date Published:

3 January, 2003

Abstract:

 

This essay has two main arguments, the first of which proposes a model for understanding narrative beginnings that focuses on both their textual dynamics (designated by the concepts of exposition and launch) and their corresponding readerly dynamics (designated by the concepts of introduction and entrance) and then uses that model to analyze Austen’s atypical beginning and its consequences in Persuasion. The novel’s exposition and launch do not invite the audience to feel that they have entered a comic world, one in which the protagonist’s eventual happiness is assured. Instead, Austen delays these assurances until the setting of the novel shifts to Lyme. As a result, Austen interjects into her comedy some striking new elements: unmerited suffering by the protagonist without any promise that it is only temporary; an awareness that the happy outcome could have been achieved by way of a much less painful route; and a corresponding awareness that, despite the happy outcome, the painful past has permanent effects. The second argument contrasts this view of Persuasion’s form and ideology with the account of both offered by Mary Poovey. Where Poovey sees the form papering over tensions in the ideology of romantic love, this essay sees the novel’s attitude toward love as more realistic than romantic. Furthermore, the analysis suggests that, in the effort to connect form and ideology, critics are likely to be better served by starting with form and then working out toward ideology rather than starting with ideology and working back toward form.

 

 

May 2019 update: James Phelan is Distinguished University Professor at Ohio State University. His research has been devoted to developing a viable account of narrative as rhetoric. He has written about style in Worlds from Words; about character and narrative progression in Reading People, Reading Plots; about voice, character narration, ethics, and audiences in Narrative as Rhetoric; about the rhetoric and ethics of character narration in Living to Tell about It; and about narrative judgments and progression in Experiencing Fiction.  He has taken up the relationship between literary history and rhetorical analysis in Reading the American Novel, 1920-2010 (2013), and he has further extended the conception and consequences of his rhetorical approach in Somebody Telling Somebody Else: A Rhetorical Poetics of Narrative (2017).  In 2020, he and Matthew Clark will publish Debating Rhetorical Narratology: On the Synthetic, Mimetic, and Thematic Aspects of Narrative. He has also engaged in direct scholarly give-and-take in Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates co-authored with David Herman, Peter J. Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson, and Robyn Warhol (2012). In 1991, Phelan brought out the autobiographical journal Beyond the Tenure Track: Fifteen Months in the Life of an English Professor. 

In addition to publishing well over 100 essays, Phelan has edited or co-edited seven collections of essays, including the Blackwell Companion to Narrative Theory (with Peter J. Rabinowitz, 2005), Teaching Narrative Theory (with David Herman and Brian McHale), and After Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narrative for the Future (with Susan R. Suleiman and Jakob Lothe, 2012).  With Gerald Graff, he has edited two textbooks for the classroom, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Case Study in Critical Controversy (1995, 2004), and The Tempest: A Case Study in Critical Controversy (2000, 2009)

Since 1992, Phelan has been the editor of Narrative, the journal of the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature. Since 1993, he has been co-editor, with Peter J. Rabinowitz (1993-2018), Robyn Warhol (2012-2016), and Katra Byram (2017--), of the Ohio State University Press series on the Theory and Interpretation of Narrative.

updated in June 2006

 

 

 

 

Publisher's Version

Volume 1, Issue 1 Literature and Ideology Narrative as a Way of Thinking
Last updated on 04/18/2020