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Routledge Studies in Romanticism. "From 1809 until just before her death, Jane Austen lived in a small, all-female household at Chawton, where reading aloud was the evening's entertainment and a crucial factor in the way Austen formed and modified her writing. This book looks in detail at Jane Austen's style. It discusses her characteristic abstract vocabulary, her adaptations of Johnsonian syntax and how she came to make her most important contribution to the technique of fiction, free indirect discourse. The book draws extensively on historical sources, especially the work of writers like Johnson, Hugh Blair and Thomas Sheridan, and analyses how Austen negotiated her path between the fundamentally masculine concerns of eighteenth-century prescriptivists and her own situation of a female writer reading her work aloud to a female audience." Yelland states that, while Austen's style has been examined, it has not previously been treated in its historical context, which he sets out to do. Specifically, he argues that she was dealing with contermporary competing ideas about language - formal (male) writing and informal (female) conversation. He's interested in the deviant speech, the experiments with writing. Originally published in hardback in 2018. List $48.95. Routgers. 2020. Pb. NEW. $42.00