"I argue that women writers of the long eighteenth century used readers' expectations about genre to reimagine their forms through expanding the socially- and narratively-limited roles of female characters. My chapters demonstrate how the female protagonists in four different texts---Charlotte Lennox's Female Quixote, Frances Burney's Evelina, Elizabeth Inchbald's Animal Magnetism, and Jane Austen's Persuasion---take on the attributes of a narrator and author by creating both their male love interests and their stories through what I call "mind writing." "Mind writing" takes the "mind reading" of cognitive literary studies back to textuality, exploring the ways that one character asserts the thoughts, feelings, actions, or intentions of another in ways analogous to a narrator. "Mind writing" another character in these texts allows the protagonist to control where the story is going and what it is doing, ultimately allowing her to parallel the work of an author. The effect is both social and narratological, as these women characters transcend the usual definitions and limitations of both "woman" and "character." Since all four of my texts work within established genre logics and patterns, breaking these expectations via "mind writing" also means that readers must re-evaluate their own positions in relation to the text. Readers of genre fiction believe they know what they are getting when they pick up a text within that field, whether in the eighteenth century or today. By flipping the script on their readers Lennox, Burney, Inchbald, and Austen rewrite their audiences just as their female characters rewrite their stories. And because generic conventions often put the reader in a position of power, either because they can pass judgement on the characters or because they know something the characters do not, refashioning the genres puts readers in a subordinate position, re-evaluating our assumptions about the stories, ourselves, and the world on which the story comments."--Pages ii-iii.
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