Feminist Theory/Practice: Narration, Story-World, and Perspective in Jane Austen' s Persuasion

This paper shows how feminist narratology approaches some of the most fundamental categories of narrative analysis. The display text is Jane Austen' s last novel, Persuasion, a concise example of Austen' s narrative techniques. After analyzing characteristics of Austen' s narrative voice, the paper draws on feminist theories of history, geography, and epistemology in discussing story-world and perspective in Persuasion. The goal is to model a set of questions and analytic strategies that would be useful to readers and critics of narrative particularly interested in how gender works within culture and in how narrative can intervene in those effects.