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Picturesque Interiority: Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy and the Novel of Information
Author(s) -
Park Suzie Asha
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
literature compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.158
H-Index - 4
ISSN - 1741-4113
DOI - 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2010.00730.x
Subject(s) - romance , memorandum , idealization , literature , character (mathematics) , romanticism , period (music) , history , psychology , art , aesthetics , archaeology , physics , geometry , mathematics , quantum mechanics
Eliza Fenwick’s Romantic novel Secresy; or, The Ruin on the Rock (1795) provides a forum for discussing two forms of writing usually thought of as linked to twentieth‐century business culture: the memorandum and classified information. Using ideas drawn from information theory – especially the idealization of both transparent and blocked communication – this essay links these concerns to developments in the psychology of depth and the interiority of character in novels of the British Romantic period. The essay shows how Secresy applies the specific language of William Gilpin’s extremely popular treatises on the picturesque technique of viewing landscapes to illustrate a close relationship between narrations of interiority and picturesque descriptions of broken, ruined, and hidden features within the British landscape.