CRITICISM

Deitz, Jonathan and Sidonie Smith. “From Precept to Proper Social Action: Empirical Maturation in Fanny Burney's Evelina.” In Eighteenth-Century Life 3, No. 3 (March 1977): 85-88.

Maintains that Villars is a less admirable character and consequently is more influential on Evelina's maturation than critics generally acknowledge.

Dowling, William C. “Evelina and the Genealogy of Literary Shame.” In Eighteenth-Century Life 16, No. 3 (November 1992): 208-20.

Discusses Burney's use of embarrassment in Evelina and suggests that this “appeal to shame”—an Augustan satirical convention—significantly influenced Jane Austen.

Hilliard, Raymond F. “Laughter Echoing from Mouth to Mouth: Symbolic Cannibalism and Gender in Evelina.” In Eighteenth-Century Life 17, No. 1 (February 1993): 46-61.

A psychoanalytic reading of Evelina whereby group violence against women—termed “ritual cannibalism”—plays a vital role in the creation and enforcement of gender identity.

Jeffrey, David K. “Manners, Morals, Magic, and Evelina.” In Enlightenment Essays 9, Nos. 1-4 (Spring-Winter 1978): 35-47.

Compares Burney's use of epistolary novel conventions in Evelina with Richardson's Pamela and Smollett's Humphrey Clinker, and comments on the originality of Burney's heroine and her unique exploration of sexual roles.

Kowaleski-Wallace, Beth. “A Night at the Opera: The Body, Class, and Art in Evelina and Frances Burney's Early Diaries.” In History, Gender and Eighteenth-Century Literature, edited by Beth Fowkes Tobin, pp. 141-58. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994.

Analyzes the opera scene in Evelina, arguing that Evelina's mortified response to her cousins' misbehavior is significant in demonstrating her attempt to define herself against what she is not; the critic sees this as suggestive of Burney's own social ideology.

Straub, Kristina. “Women's Pastimes and the Ambiguity of Female Self-Identification in Fanny Burney's Evelina.” In Eighteenth-Century Life 10, No. 2 (May 1986): 58-72.

Examines Burney's discomfort with the ways women were told to spend their time, and shows how Evelina attempts to separate female identity from trivial female pursuits without openly challenging this social convention.

Vopat, James B. “Evelina: Life as Art—Notes Toward Becoming a Performer on the Stage of Life.” In Essays in Literature 2, No. 1 (Spring 1975): 42-52.

Maintains that Evelina is a durable work of literature because of its theme that life “can be controlled and, in fact, be lived as art.”

Zomchick, John. “Satire and the Bourgeois Subject in Frances Burney's Evelina.” In Cutting Edges: Postmodern Critical Essays on Eighteenth-Century Satire, Tennessee Studies in Literature 37, edited by James E. Gill, pp. 347-66. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995.

Examines the use of satire in Evelina and discusses how satire's “moment of negation” leads to the creation of “a unified bourgeois subject” that is freed from a violent public sphere.

Additional coverage of Burney's life and career is contained in the following source published by the Gale Group: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 39.