Judith Huber

Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2 (B), University of Hamburg (Institute for Anglistics/American Studies), course: Proseminar "From Funny Fop to Dangerous Dandy - Fashion in 17th and 18th Century Literature", 9 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: The city of Bath has served as the scene of many 18 and 19 century novels, like Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Tobias Smollet’s Roderick Random, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones and, of course, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey; Persuasion and Emma. In Bath, one could find the quintessence of all the illusions, values and con- th flicts of the 18 century (Hill 1989: 2); its rules of etiquette fixed by Richard ‘Beau’ Nash influenced ‘the manners of the entire nation throughout the Georgian era’. An official Bath guide read that the city had ‘become one of the most agreeable as well as most polite places in the Kingdom’ (Watkins 1990: 178). But as the century wore on, the spa became less fashionable, the nobility became bored of it, and middle class people swamped the town. The three novels by Jane Austen mentioned above date from this time, when Bath’s heyday was over. In my opinion, it is particularly interesting to take a look on the image of Bath as it is conveyed by these three novels, because of the different viewpoints of the characters: In Northanger Abbey, the city is described from a middle class perspective, in Persuasion from an upper class perspective, and in Emma, where none of the action actually takes place in Bath, we get an idea of what people in the country thought about the city of Bath; it is described from an extern point of view. This paper will examine the literary characterisation of the city as a place of amusement (balls, concerts, etc.), display and representation by looking at the characters’ attitudes towards Bath and the purpose of their stay there. The further aim is a cultural description of the city with regard to its fashionableness, based on the novels of Jane Austen.

Display, Representation and Fashion in Jane Austen's Bath - Northanger Abbey, Persuasion and Emma

Hans Sauer

Robert Mailhammer

Ursula Lenker

Gaby Waxenberger

The fifteen papers selected for Volume II of English Historical Linguistics 2008 have a different emphasis than those in Volume I (CILT 314, Lenker et al. 2010). Nine concentrate on the development of the English vocabulary and six on historical text linguistics, including the development of text-types and of politeness strategies. Of those in the former group, three have their emphasis on etymology, three on semantic fields, and three on word-formation, although some cover more than one of these areas. The topics include: the treatment of etymological problems in the OED; deverbal derivations formed from native verbs and from loan-verbs; the role of metaphor and metonymy in the evolution of word-fields. The field of historical text linguistics is introduced by a general survey, which is followed by more specific studies focussing on 15th-century legal and administrative texts from Scotland, on early 15th-century women's mystical writings, on medical recipes from the 16th to the 18th centuries and on pauper letters from 18th-century Essex. The book should appeal to scholars interested in English etymology, the history of semantic fields and of word-formation, as well as in historical text linguistics, politeness strategies and standardization. It provides not only theoretical considerations but also a wealth of case studies.

English Historical Linguistics 2008: Words, texts and genres

This work is a study of how motion is expressed in medieval English. It provides extensive inventories of verbs used in intransitive motion meanings in Old and Middle English and discusses these in terms of the manner-salience of early English

Judith Huber

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