The Project

Liminality and the 18th Century:   Outline of a Research Project

Manuel Aguirre
Esteban Pujals

"[…] when you have finished Udolpho, we will read the Italian together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you."
"Have you, indeed! How glad I am! - What are they all?"
"I will read you their names directly; here they are, in my pocket-book. Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries. Those will last us some time."
"Yes, pretty well; but are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid?"
"Yes, quite sure; for a particular friend of mine, a miss Andrews, a sweet girl, one of the sweetest creatures in the world, has read every one of them […]."

Northanger Abbey, chapter VI

1. Premises

Over the last forty years, our inherited history of literature has appeared as a construction supported on the notions of the "canon" and its contrary, the "margin". The spatial metaphor implicit in the second term has given rise to an exclusion of specific discourses from the literary space. Without ever defining the marginal, the very success of this metaphor has created an insoluble problem within the paradigm that gave rise to it: that of the interrelation between the literary space of the canon and the negation of this space which shapes the margin. Many are the concepts which a variety of disciplines have developed or borrowed in order to come to grips with this problem: the "interface" of chemistry or computer science, Derrida's "supplement" (1967), Genette's "paratexts" (1975, 1987), Bakhtin's "dialogism" (1975), Kristeva's "intertextuality" (1967), the "liminal" stage in rites of passage (Van Gennep 1909, Turner 1969), or the "self-similarity" of fractal objects (Mandelbrot 1975). The rise of these has taken place simultaneously with a growing recognition of the ontological function of the "Other" in all its shapes. These and many other phenomena in recent science suggest that major changes are taking place in our attitudes to knowledge. Central to the emerging consensus stand the recognition of polymorphism, the need for a cultural topology, and a concept of the threshold.

In the wake of this reconceptualization, an earlier project (Systemic Analysis of "Marginal" Literatures (PB93-0242), directed by Aguirre between 1994 and 1997) established a distinction between "the marginal" and "the liminal" in the monograph Margins and Thresholds (Aguirre, Quance and Sutton 2000). A subsequent project, Threshold and Text (BFF2000-0093; Aguirre, Bredendick, Soto, Pujals 2000-2003), developed a theory of liminality applicable to literary discourses, and has so far inspired 5 conferences, over 50 articles, 7 books, 2 doctoral dissertations and several advanced research monographs. This theory posited a functional rather than a categorial understanding of the concept of liminality, with the result that the liminal turned out to be not a specific literary type or current but a principle inherent in all literary activity and a historical constant. On these premises the Northanger Library Project (HUM2006-03404) was set up with (as the previous research projects) funding from the Spanish Ministry of Education through the DGICYT, to offer a "liminalist" approach to 18th-century culture, and more specifically to one of the literary genres born in this period and which best characterize it: the Gothic genre.

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2. Liminal periods

Of course, thresholds do not exist objectively in the flow of time; but they are of great value as heuristic instruments. Our current understanding of some historical periods invites us to see them as points of inflexion in the evolution of a culture. The 11th and 12th centuries (the so-called "medieval Renaissance": Gimpel 1975), the 16th century (with its aura of a "second Renaissance"), or the 18th century are crisis moments in which, it might be said, the Western world crosses decisive thresholds. In particular, the 18th century witnesses a series of changes which condition our modernity on all levels: linguistic, political, ontological, social, artistic, literary, scientific. Our very notion of evolution, the scientific concept of system, or the modern idea of history are (like our idea itself of "modernity") born in this age, and with them the possibility of a "liminalist" perspective on historical events. British sentimental and pre-Romantic writings reveal for the first time the consciousness of a difference vis-a-vis the past and, a fortiori, the culture's conviction of having crossed a line of no return. This awareness of discontinuity in turn gives rise to, on the one hand, a project for renewal which entails awareness of a second threshold, this time open to the future, so that the notion of human perfectibility begins to fascinate both artist and scientist; on the other hand, an immense nostalgia can be detected for the past left behind.

Between these two temporal thresholds, the 18th century can be defined as a liminal age, half way between past and future. Western culture is ceasing to be a finished construct and instead begins to open up to the hereafter. In modifying the Lockean "life, liberty and property" into "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness", the American Declaration of Independence outlines a veritable programme of improvement for the age. But this very opening up to the future produces an instability which in turn calls for closure, when not for enclosure. For the downside of the enthusiasm bred by that perfectibility is an uncertainty not merely vis-a-vis the future (now necessarily open) but also towards the legitimacy of the change. A crisis of cultural identity leads to the systematic exclusion of the Other, while the open world which had for centuries defined the human relation with the Numinous is transformed into a closed space as a precondition for the quantification, study and reshaping of reality (Aguirre 1990). At this juncture emerge both modern mathematics and literary criticism, but equally the enslaving of the Other and the literature of terror.

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3. A culture on the threshold

To begin with, we must point at the causal nexus which, for the first time in the West, is fraught between ethics and aesthetics and which in the Neoclassical period leads to the rise of a project for the improvement not only of the social system but of the human condition, of Nature itself-a project on which art and politics begin to work with a joint will. In the second place, this age witnesses the phenomenon of multiple exclusions. There is of course racial exclusion (with slavery cementing the prosperity of the democratic British metropolis and of other European powers through their African colonies). There is also the marginalization of woman in work and education (that long process of social degradation summarized and denounced in Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman 1792), the segregation of mental illness in asylums estranged from urban centres (Foucault 1961), the containment of death in extramural cemeteries (Ariés 1977), the creation of a social class bound to build the new order but unable to access its benefits, the use of children as a cheap labour force precisely in the century which witnesses the first projects for child education (inspired by Locke's An Essay on Education 1693) and a literature specifically addressed to children (initiated by John Newbery in 1744). Everything seems to indicate that the social system has successfully redefined itself around a set of hierarchical, patriarchal, capitalist, nationalist and excluding concepts which actually marginalize the vast majority of the human race and experience. As a result, images of the excluded Other begin to proliferate and to disport a threatening mien. Perhaps the official culture does not exist in a permanent state of paranoia only because it exults in a permanent imperialist euphoria: as attack is the best form of defence, so invasion seems the best means of containment.

To be sure (and this, in confirmation of the liminal quality of the 18th century), these remarks can hardly be accepted as an objective valuation of the period-witness the effort by so many europhiles (Madame de Staël would be a paradigmatic example) bent on transcending cultural, political or social barriers. Taken as a whole, Modernity appears to us as unstable and paradoxical, as a culture of uncertainty. It acquires consciousness of a breach with the past and simultaneously "discovers" history. This produces ambivalent or contradictory reactions: the satisfaction of having parted with feudal-like despotisms goes together with a nostalgia for a lost past before the age of despotism, and this past now begins to seem an innocent Arcadia to which it would be desirable to return (but there grows likewise the bitter awareness that there is no such Arcadia, since, as the Industrial Revolution is making plain, Nature is all but immutable). In a reaction against the simplistic views of the Enlightenment, the second half of the 18th century also counterpoints rationality with feeling, with unbridled passion (the "ruling passion"), with a fascination for involuntary behaviour (tears, spasms, faints), for the "innocent spontaneity" of women and children (as manifested in the poetry of Blake or Wordsworth), a sympathy for disgraced nobility (Schiller Die Räuber 1781), for the satanic figure (Byron Manfred 1817), for the fallen hero, for the noble savage. These double tendencies take concrete shape in the literature of sentiment and emotion, in a concept of the sublime which entails the terrifying (Burke 1756), in the pleasure of weeping and fear (Barbauld 1773), in the growth of a sensationalist literature which places first the highwayman, then the urban criminal (as well as the observer turned detective) in positions traditionally occupied by the hero.

In the third place, we note a similar complexity in literary evolution. If, on the one hand, the English novel emerges as a genre representative of bourgeois, patriarchal, nationalist and imperialist values, on the other there arises a Gothic genre associated to it but with a subversive slant. Significantly, the contrast between these two forms, so close in origin, is to drift into the struggle between a novelistic "canon" and a "popular" novel. The Gothic genre constitutes a synthesis of all the ambiguities of its age: a society in the grip of change which desires and fears change, a rationalism which at the same time admires and seeks irrationality, a radical separation vis-a-vis the past which right away breeds nostalgia, a rejection of all despotic forms of government which simultaneously expresses a fascination for absolute control. Another emerging genre, that of Slave Narrative, combines Western (Anglosaxon) narrative procedures with others of African origin in order to question the philosophical vocabulary of the Enlightenment ("race", "progress", "civilization", "barbarism", "savagery", "nature") and subvert an order of enlightened liberties which thrives thanks to slavery (Todorov 1994, Eze 1997). This period, too, witnesses the emergence of a sensationalist narrative which explores the criminal or "monstrous" aspects of human nature, and which shall pave the way for detective fiction and the thriller, and, at a further remove, for certain brands of Science-Fiction. All these genres exhibit multiple liminality on several levels: plot, theme, characterization, structure, cultural function (Aguirre 2000). Other literary phenomena of the time display a peculiar "hybridization", the most remarkable among these being perhaps the transition from a rural folklore to a popular urban literature not only via the chapbooks, magazines and periodicals of the time but through the Gothic genre itself, which (as the project will try to prove) builds on folklore premises.

On the whole, then, it is a question of finding in 18th-century literature the very roots of deep changes whose repercussions are still being felt in our time. But this "definition" of the 18th century cannot prosper without a map of literary productions beyond canons and frontiers. In this regard, Gothic displays another distinctive trait: whereas it is essentially a British genre, both its debt to and its impact on the European cultural tradition make it an epitome of the age's complexity. As Horner (2002:2-3) states, a definition of the Gothic genre forces us to study not merely the literary currents of France, Germany or Russia, but also the construction of the several European identities, the representation of Southern Europe by its northern neighbours, of Eastern Europe by the West. The NLP  proposes an analysis of the age's literary forms from a liminalist perspective. This in turn requires publishing 18th-century texts which have rarely been reedited. Hence the following goals.

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4. Goals

1. To recover for both researchers and readers, through formal studies and critical editions, a literature of which much is being written but whose primary texts are scarcely known. We intend, first of all, to produce editions of Gothic texts which are unavailable at present, including the seven titles mentioned in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, namely: The Castle of Wolfenbach (E.Parsons), Clermont (R.M.Roche), The Mysterious Warning (E.Parsons), The Necromancer (K.F.Kahlert), The Midnight Bell (F.Lathom), The Orphan of the Rhine (E.Sleath), Horrid Mysteries (K.Grosse);

2. to edit other texts from diverse sources that will include short stories, poetry, drama and essay, all belonging to the late 18th and early 19th centuries;

3. to produce bilingual editions of such texts as Schiller's German Die Räuber (1781), the anonymous French Fantasmagoriana (1815), or A.Pérez Zaragoza's Spanish Galería fúnebre (1831) so as to highlight the European dimension to which this British genre belongs. In this way we will try to recover for researchers a currently inaccessible cultural legacy;

4. to contribute to a liminalist theorization of the 18th century that may help clear up the contradictions which often accompany the description of some aspects of the age;

5. this theorization will involve a search for the origins of that epistemological uncertainty which is a hallmark of Modernity and which, supported by a poetics of synecdoche and a rhetoric of contraries, shapes a culture-on-the-threshold;

6. lastly, this theorization will likewise require us to seek in the 18th century the roots of our modern interest in the human Other (ghost, monster, the grotesque, the figure of the criminal, the Outsider, the Double) as a literary subject

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5. The field

In particular, the investigation into European sources and echoes of Gothic forces us to posit a "field view" of literature within which we can discern minimally three axial systems in fluctuation, interaction and change: canonical literature, folklore, and popular culture. By "field" we do not mean what is entailed in the geologist's or anthropologist's concept of "field work", nor what Bourdieu (1992) has termed le champ littéraire . In this author's view the literary is an autonomous domain which detaches itself from bourgeois discourses, from art in an "impure" state, around the 1870s. We envisage rather a continuity of discourses, the incontrovertible fact that literature is part of a discursive field even when it tries to turn against it. To speak of a field theory of literature is to deny the objective existence of pure forms, of invariant structures, of unalterable values; it is, rather, to assert that literary forms emerge temporally from the field and eventually dissolve back into it, not before having engendered other, equally evanescent forms (though evanescence, too, is relative to viewpoint); it is likewise to assert that all forms are hybrid forms , although in certain cultures or at certain periods they may be taken as pure. When this happens, they appear as normative; when, on the contrary, they are highlighted or identified by their hybrid nature, their liminal quality stands out.

A field approach can best provide insights into the profound change which the Gothic genre has undergone at the hands of the critical profession. Before the 1960s Gothic literature (rather, the Gothic novel) had been an object of study for dilettanti whose labour used to merit hardly a few lines in literature anthologies and histories. The cases of Birkhead (1921), Railo (1927) or Summers (1938, 1940) are well known. Thanks to these Gothic literature could demand a footnote in studies of Romanticism; but its position remained decidedly in the domain of the marginal until the 1960s "rediscovered" its worth. Some major titles in this second phase, defining the genre thematically, socially or ideologically, are Varma (1957), Lévy (1968), Llopis (1974), Punter (1980), Tymn (1981), Bleiler (1983), Baldick (1987), Aguirre (1990), Kilgour (1995), Botting (1996). Since the Sixties, the Gothic genre has gained in status to the point of occupying, in many a critic's view, the very centre of the debate on culture. From being a "marginal" genre (and one marginalized by criticism), Gothic has become what can only be called a "liminal" genre.

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6. Gothic and the critics

In this change in critical attitudes the pendulum has swung to the other extreme-and this, in dramatic confirmation of what one basic postulate in liminality theory predicts: the threshold, by virtue of the fact that it is no actual space, tends to expand and to encroach on all spaces. Such is, culturally, the case with our contemporary perception of this genre: the concept of Gothic has become so prestigious that it now invades all literary domains. According to critic Leslie Fiedler (1960), all of the USA literary production since the 19th century is (with the unaccountable exception of Hemingway's work) essentially Gothic. Why such a prestige? The genre is associated with transgression, subversion and deviance, with vindication and alterity; it invites links with a vulgarized reading of Derrida's concept of différance; it has coopted patterns of (sociopolitical, sexual, religious) resistance; in Gelder's (2000:2) words, we have come to acknowledge that "horror inhabits the very fabric of ordinary life, daily picking away at the limits of reason". The genre is also associated with a lack of decorum, with the excessive, and with ambiguity inasmuch as it proposes a transformation of the moral being into a predator; it is in consequence disorientating (ib.:3). Relating to the monstrous and the illegitimate, Gothic is "anti-bourgeois" (Fiedler 1960:107) and thus constitutes a propitious environment for the criminal, the monster, the outsider, the Other. These and other traits have made the genre a standard-bearer of counter- and subcultures over the last forty years.

The result, however, is rather paradoxical. On the one hand, far from existing in a marginal, when not a negated space, Gothic has come to occupy, in the eyes of many critics, the largest part of American, if not Western, cultural space. It has subsumed areas such as Science-Fiction, the Southern novel, the fantastic genre, magical realism, or postmodernity, and is turning into an emblem for globalization. Yet on the other hand, such a re-demarcation is only practiced in the domain of the novel, while every other Gothic form such as the short story, drama, poetry or essay is carefully omitted from study. Critical focus on past Gothic is decidedly limited, and 20th-century novels (and films) hog the limelight. The semantic range of "Gothic" has thus not only broadened but shifted.

Furthermore, the very success of such concepts as "subversion" since the 1960s has neutralized a great deal of their effectiveness or even of their meaning. The NLP  certainly does not seek to give up the critical bent which has characterized the study of Gothic over the last decades, but to approach the genre in a different way. The major matter now pending is an analysis of its forms as a precondition for understanding its meanings (see Aguirre 1990, Leffler 2000). This includes the study of imagery, collocations, specific uses of semantic fields, narrative structures, themes, motifs and thematic patterns, and the place of all these in a history of the evolution of forms. The lack of a historical and formal vision lies behind the many problems recent criticism suffers from: its attentive but limited consideration of the figure of the Gothic woman, its total indifference towards the demarcation principle (see Lévy's insightful "Gothic and the Critical Idiom" 1994), its unawareness of the true role folklore plays in the genre, its careful neglect of non-novelistic Gothic genres, its open reluctance to acknowledge that popular culture, folklore and literary canon interact in that "textual field" of which we wrote earlier.

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7. Teaching

As an indispensable adjunct to this research, the NLP  has a major teaching dimension. It seeks to develop research abilities in postgraduate students, to allow them to make real contributions to a "textual data base"-the Northanger Library itself-and to give them an opportunity to produce publishable research. To satisfy these aims we must first put in their hands "authentic" texts they can analyze, plus the appropriate criteria, tools and strategies for the treatment of 18th-century texts, plus a repertory of formal aspects to be examined. A pilot project, The Gothic Library, was set up in 2004 to encourage undergraduate students in 3rd and 4th years to make a modest but effective contribution to research through scanning, transcribing and annotating short Gothic narratives. In parallel with this initiative, students were invited to attend the Liminality Seminars, ongoing since 1998, and the ISLT (International Seminar on Liminality and Text) , a biennial event next to be held in 2009.

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8. Editing

To the research and teaching we must add a third prong, the editorial aspects of the NLP  THE GATEWAY PRESS, founded in 1999, has been publishing much of our research on liminality in its first series, Studies in Liminality and Literature. It is now launching its new series, The Northanger Library , initially to be issued in electronic format-the present Website being hosted by TGP. In this site we plan to issue a variety of studies and critical editions of Gothic and related materials in what we hope will soon be a growing Northanger Library page. These will include editions of forgotten Gothic classic novels. Poetry, essay and drama, as well as various German, French and Spanish texts from the period will also receive their due share of attention.

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9. Prior results

Our work on earlier projects (Systemic Analysis of "Marginal" Literatures, PB93-0242; Threshold and Text, BFF 2000-0093) cleared the way for a theory of liminality first outlined in the volume Margins and Thresholds (Aguirre, Quance, Sutton 2000). The Liminality Seminars (a permanent initiative coordinated by Aguirre and Pujals) have been running since 1998. The International Seminar on Liminality and Text (1999, 2001, 2003, 2005, 2007) has been held five times so far with some 20 outside (mostly European) contributors and 10 from within Spain. THE GATEWAY PRESS (founded by Aguirre, Pujals and Soto in 2000) has issued seven volumes in its first series, Studies in Liminality and Literature. A number of doctoral dissertations and advanced research monographs directed by members of the team have tackled problems of liminality and epistemology. The TRELLIS Papers, a series of working papers edited by Aguirre and Piqueras, are another direct result of these concerns. The postgraduate studies programme Unstable Identities (coordinated by Aguirre in the Department of English Studies at the UAM between 1994 and 2003) has liminality as one of its axes.

Some of our most basic conclusions so far: 1) the Numinous, the fantastic, the polyvalent, the Excluded Middle are so many manifestations of the liminal. 2) Heteroglossia, intertextuality and interfaces represent various types of threshold interaction. 3) The Forest of Adventure, the Haunted Castle, the labyrinth and the Frontier are liminal spaces. 4) Both hero and antagonist exist on the threshold in folktale, myth, epic and adventure novel. 5) The processes of genesis and evolution of literary genres are liminal phenomena. 6) The threshold is inherently ambiguous, having both a linear and a spatial nature, so that it may be sometimes crossed, sometimes entered. 7) As an instrument of analysis, liminality allows us to identify sites, objects, characters, events, texts whose most distinctive trait is their resistance to definition, classification and analysis within conventional theoretical frameworks. A summary of our conclusions is included in "The Lure of the Limen" (Aguirre 2006). 8) On the whole, liminality is an essential condition of all cultural objects. Whether this condition stands out or else is blurred will depend on positioning, goals sought, and other factors, but it will be impossible to ignore it. 9) According to this postulate, hybridization, "mestizaje", intertextuality, transitional states obtain in all cultural systems, and so in all literary systems. 10) A fortiori, our second postulate (the need for which was amply shown during the conference The Dynamics of the Threshold in March 2005) is that every cultural object exists "in process", is dynamic, unstable, mutable and "incomplete".

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10. Working hypotheses

Our previous project (Threshold and Text, 2000-03) built on the proposition that the study of thresholds, borders and frontiers must become a central discipline in literature studies. For our initial hypotheses in the NLP  we propose, first of all, that Gothic inherits a rhetoric of contraries from the Baroque. The study of the forms of Gothic will reveal that the genre gradually modifies this rhetoric to construct a binary and hierarchical vision of reality and consciousness in the late 18th century. The epistemological uncertainty which is a hallmark of our contemporary culture originates in the siècle des lumières. The literary forgeries of Macpherson, Chatterton, or Walpole himself can be seen as so many attempts to shape an alternative "canon". We suggest that these are all features which characterize a culture on the threshold, and that the study of the 18th century as a whole and of the Gothic genre in particular demands an application of the concept of liminality.

As stated, this requires an analysis of the narrative structures of the genre, of its rhetoric, of its forms. But if we are to avoid confusing Gothic with its sources, analogues and epigones, the problem of demarcating Gothic as a historical genre must be addressed. This in turn demands that we define the space in which Gothic and Baroque, but also Romanticism, Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, the Graveyard School of poetry, as well as folklore and other cultural phenomena emerge, develop and change. We must define the (textual rather than literary) system in which Gothic is inscribed. A field theory must guide our examination of the genre, of its rhetoric, of its liminality. The project articulates itself around these four key notions: demarcation, field, form and liminality.

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11. Methodology

Applying the assumptions of a theory of liminality to the C18 and to Gothic literature involves, first of all, in-depth analysis of Gothic texts from the premise that they are generated in a middle ground between folklore and literature; that they must, therefore, respond to a significant degree to oral tradition criteria; and that the tools used by scholars to study folklore are applicable to Gothic. On the other hand, a liminalist definition of the C18 must involve careful attention to its "border" zones. These include the contours of several literary genres, the borderlines between them (and the problems surrounding these), the dialectics between body and soul (Porter 2005), between past and present, between the country and the city (Williams 1973), the Cartesian dichotomy between the real and the illusory and its impact on the empiricist philosophy of Shaftesbury, Locke, Priestley, Hartley and natural philosophy, but also on the poetry of William Blake and the pre-Romantics, as well as on the imaginary of Gothic literature.

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12. Related projects

The NLP  links up with the work of many other groups in Europe and, especially, in the UK, where the study of the 18th century and the recovery of its texts are a growing concern. Let the following examples suffice: the Chawton House Library cooperates with the University of Southampton on the Novels Online project, transcribing into searchable text a large collection of materials from between 1600 and 1830 (also on these materials, the Chawton MA in Eighteenth-Century Studies has been set up). In collaboration with the CH Library and with researchers from the universities of Southampton and Kent, in 2007 the publishing house Pickering & Chatto initiated a collection of 18th-century women's fiction, travel writings and memoirs. Since 1997, the University of Wales at Cardiff and the CEIR (Centre for Editorial and Intertextual Research) work on the Cardiff Corvey Project based on the Corvey corpus, the best extant collection of popular European fiction between 1798 and 1834. Other projects based on this corpus (which contains over 9000 volumes) are underway at the universities of Paderborn (Germany), Innsbruck (Austria) and, in particular, Sheffield Hallam (UK), where since 1995 the Sheffield Hallam Corvey Project studies and edits texts from the Corvey collection. The University of York and the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies, together with reserchers from Berlin and North Carolina, work on the project Nations, Borders and Identities: The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in European Experience 1792-1815, which studies the impact of these wars on civilian populations through autobiographical texts of the period. No editor, however, has as yet undertaken the task of publishing a series of Gothic texts. Designed to fill in a considerable gap,The Northanger Library Project thus seeks to play a role in the rediscovery of the Gothic genre in Europe as well as to offer a contribution to the history of 18th-century culture.

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13. References

Aguirre, Manuel 1990 The Closed Space. Manchester: Manchester University Press

Aguirre, Manuel 2000 "Narrative Structure, Liminality, Self-Similarity: the Case of Gothic Fiction", in Soto (ed.) 2000, pp. 133-51; repr. in Bloom 2007, pp. 226-47

Aguirre, Manuel 2006 "The Lure of the Limen: An Introduction to the Concept, Uses and Problems of Liminality", in The TRELLIS Papers 1.

Aguirre, Manuel, Roberta Quance & Philip Sutton 2000 Margins and Thresholds: An Enquiry into the Concept of Liminality in Text Studies. Madrid: THE GATEWAY PRESS

Ariés, Philip 1977 L'heure de notre mort. Paris : Éditions du Seuil Austen, JaneNorthanger Abbey 1818. In Northanger Abbey, Lady Susan, The Watsons, and Sanditon (ed. John Davie). Oxford: The World's Classics, Oxford UP 1980.

Bakhtin, Mihail 1975 The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (tr. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist). Austin: University of Texas Press1981

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