Books by Joe Bray

Joe Bray's careful analysis of Jane Austen's stylistic techniques reveals that the genius of her writing is far from effortless; Subsequent chapters investigate and challenge the common critical associations of Austen's style with moral prescriptivism, ideas of balance and harmony, and literal as opposed to figurative expression.

Beginning with the premise that the portrait was undergoing a shift in both form and function during the Romantic age, this title examines how these changes are reflected in the fiction of writers such as Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Elizabeth Hamilton and Amelia Opie.

In the second half of the eighteenth century the female reader was a frequent topic of cultural debate and moral concern. This book examines the variety of ways in which women 'read' the social world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century novel.

This book argues that the way the eighteenth-century epistolary novel represented consciousness had a significant influence on the later novel, a view that had been largely ignored in most accounts of the development of the novel.