鈥淪tupid Tingmouth Stuff鈥�: Contemporary Language and the Problem of Propriety in Evelina
Kristin Zodrow, University of California, Berkeley
Author Biography
Kristin Zodrow is a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley, where she studies eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and ecology. Her research within the environmental humanities has been supported by the University of Chicago and the Dumbarton Oaks botanic garden and archive. Formerly a plant scientist, she maintains an interest in contemporary biological research by writing poetry about it.
Abstract
New words appear as a result of emergent patterns in contemporary speech and literary works. This essay re-evaluates the well-worn antagonism between living language and coalescing standards of English grammar in the eighteenth century within Frances Burney鈥檚 first novel, Evelina (1778), where this conflict emerges as a uniquely gendered problem. I argue that the novel presents the tension between its two senses of 鈥減ropriety,鈥� correctness in both a social and semantic sense, in its depiction of the speech and behavior of women. Attending to a narrator who calls herself and her compositions 鈥減articular鈥� allows us to grasp the import of Burney鈥檚 neologisms in Evelina as well as their reception amid the broader aesthetic and philological debates of her time.
Keywords
Burney, Frances, 1752鈥�1840; Evelina; Johnson, Samuel, 1709鈥�1784; neologism; colloquialism; grammar; dictionary; propriety; particularity; detail; women; gender; philology; novel
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