Just how did Jane Austen become the celebrity author and the inspiration for generations of loyal fans she is today? Devoney Looser’s The Making of Jane Austen turns to the people, performances, ...activism, and images that fostered Austen’s early fame, laying the groundwork for the beloved author we think we know. Here are the Austen influencers, including her first English illustrator, the eccentric Ferdinand Pickering, whose sensational gothic images may be better understood through his brushes with bullying, bigamy, and an attempted matricide. The daring director-actress Rosina Filippi shaped Austen’s reputation with her pioneering dramatizations, leading thousands of young women to ventriloquize Elizabeth Bennet’s audacious lines before drawing room audiences. Even the supposedly staid history of Austen scholarship has its bizarre stories. The author of the first Jane Austen dissertation, student George Pellew, tragically died young, but he was believed by many, including his professor-mentor, to have come back from the dead. Looser shows how these figures and their Austen-inspired work transformed Austen’s reputation, just as she profoundly shaped theirs. Through them, Looser describes the factors and influences that radically altered Austen’s evolving image. Drawing from unexplored material, Looser examines how echoes of that work reverberate in our explanations of Austen’s literary and cultural power. Whether you’re a devoted Janeite or simply Jane-curious, The Making of Jane Austen will have you thinking about how a literary icon is made, transformed, and handed down from generation to generation.
Matters of Fact in Jane Austen: History, Location, and Celebrity makes the bold assertion that Jane Austen’s novels allude to actual high-profile politicians and contemporary celebrities as well as ...to famous historical figures and landed estates. Janine Barchas is the first to conduct extensive research into the names and locations in Austen’s fiction by taking full advantage of the explosion of archival materials now available online.
According to Barchas, Austen plays confidently with the tantalizing tension between truth and invention which characterizes the realist novel. Of course, the argument that Austen deployed famous names presupposes an active celebrity culture during the Regency, a phenomenon recently accepted by scholars. The names Austen plucks from history for her protagonists (such as Dashwood, Wentworth, Woodhouse, Tilney, Fitzwilliam, and many more) were hugely famous in her day. She seems to bank upon this familiarity for interpretive effect, often upending associations with comic intent.
Barchas re-situates Austen’s work nearer to the historical novels of her contemporary Sir Walter Scott than to the domestic and biographical perspectives that until recently have dominated Austen studies. This forward-thinking and revealing investigation offers scholars and ardent fans of Jane Austen a wealth of juicy historical facts, while shedding an interpretive light on a new aspect of the work of a much-beloved writer.
Selected byChoicemagazine as an Outstanding Academic Title Jane Austen, arguably the most beloved of all English novelists, has been regarded both as a feminist ahead of her time and as a social ...conservative whose satiric comedies work to regulate rather than to liberate. Such viewpoints, however, do not take sufficient stock of the historical Austen, whose writings, as William Galperin shows, were more properly oppositional rather than either disciplinary or subversive. Reading the history of her novels' reception through other histories-literary, aesthetic, and social-The Historical Austenis a major reassessment of Jane Austen's achievement as well as a corrective to the historical Austen that abides in literary scholarship. In contrast to interpretations that stress the conservative aspects of the realistic tradition that Austen helped to codify, Galperin takes his lead from Austen's contemporaries, who were struck by her detailed attention to the dynamism of everyday life. Noting how the very act of reading demarcates an horizon of possibility at variance with the imperatives of plot and narrative authority,The Historical Austensees Austen's development as operating in two registers. Although her writings appear to serve the interests of probability in representing "things as they are," they remain, as her contemporaries dubbed them, histories of the present, where reality and the prospect of change are continually intertwined. In a series of readings of the six completed novels, in addition to the epistolaryLady Susanand the uncompletedSanditon, Galperin offers startling new interpretations of these texts, demonstrating the extraordinary awareness that Austen maintained not only with respect to her narrative practice-notably, free indirect discourse-but also with attention to the novel's function as a social and political instrument.
A reexamination of Austen's unpublished writings that uncovers their continuity with her celebrated novels—and that challenges distinctions between her "early" and "late" work Jane Austen's six ...novels, published toward the end of her short life, represent a body of work that is as brilliant as it is compact. Her earlier writings have routinely been dismissed as mere juvenilia, or stepping stones to mature proficiency and greatness. Austen's first biographer described them as "childish effusions." Was he right to do so? Can the novels be definitively separated from the unpublished works? In Jane Austen, Early and Late, Freya Johnston argues that they cannot.Examining the three manuscript volumes in which Austen collected her earliest writings, Johnston finds that Austen's regard and affection for them are revealed by her continuing to revisit and revise them throughout her adult life. The teenage works share the milieu and the humour of the novels, while revealing more clearly the sources and influences upon which Austen drew. Johnston upends the conventional narrative, according to which Austen discarded the satire and fantasy of her first writings in favour of the irony and realism of the novels. By demonstrating a stylistic and thematic continuity across the full range of Austen's work, Johnston asks whether it makes sense to speak of an early and a late Austen at all. Jane Austen, Early and Late offers a new picture of the author in all her complexity and ambiguity, and shows us that it is not necessarily true that early work yields to later, better things.
Jane Austen was received by her contemporaries as a new voice, but her late twentieth-century reputation as a nostalgic reactionary still lingers on. In this radical revision of her engagement with ...the culture and politics of her age, Peter Knox-Shaw argues that Austen was a writer steeped in the Enlightenment, and that her allegiance to a sceptical tradition within it, shaped by figures such as Adam Smith and David Hume, lasted throughout her career. Knox-Shaw draws on archival and other neglected sources to reconstruct the intellectual atmosphere of the Steventon Rectory where Austen wrote her juvenilia, and follows the course of her work through the 1790s and onwards, showing how minutely responsive it was to the many shifting movements of those turbulent years. Jane Austen and the Enlightenment is an important contribution to the study both of Jane Austen and of intellectual history at the turn of the nineteenth century.
'Reading Austen in America' presents a colourful, compelling account of how an appreciative audience for Austen's novels originated and developed in America, and how American readers contributed to ...the rise of Austen's international fame.
Recreating Jane Austen is a book for readers who know and love Austen's work. Stimulated by the recent crop of film and television versions of Austen's novels, John Wiltshire examines how they have ...been transposed and 'recreated' in another age and medium. Wiltshire illuminates the process of 'recreation' through the work of the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, and offers Jane Austen's own relation to Shakespeare as a suggestive parallel. Exploring the romantic impulse in Austenian biography, 'Jane Austen' as a commodity, and offering a re-interpretation of Pride and Prejudice, this book approaches the central question of the role Jane Austen plays in the contemporary cultural imagination.
Corpus Linguistics in Literary Analysis provides a theoretical introduction to corpus stylistics and also demonstrates its application by presenting corpus stylistic analyses of literary texts and ...corpora. The first part of the book addresses theoretical issues such as the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity in corpus linguistic analyses, criteria for the evaluation of results from corpus linguistic analyses and also discusses units of meaning in language. The second part of the book takes this theory and applies it to Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen and to two corpora consisting of 1) Austen's six novels and 2) texts that are contemporary with Austen. The analyses demonstrate the impact of various features of text on literary meanings and how corpus tools can extract new critical angles. This book will be a key read for upper level undergraduates and postgraduates working in corpus linguistics and in stylistics on linguistics and language studies courses.
Austen and Woolf are materialists, this book argues. ‘Things’ in their novels give us entry into some of the most contentious issues of the day. This wholly materialist understanding produces worldly ...realism, an experimental writing practice which asserts egalitarian continuity between people, things and the physical world. This radical redistribution of the importance of material objects and biological existence, challenges the traditional idealist hierarchy of mind over matter that has justified gender, class and race subordination. Entering their writing careers at the critical moments of the French Revolution and the First World War respectively, and sharing a political inheritance of Scottish Enlightenment scepticism, Austen’s and Woolf’s rigorous critiques of the dangers of mental vision unchecked by facts is more timely than ever in the current world dominated by fundamentalist neo-liberal, religious and nationalist belief systems.
Jane Austen, game theorist Chwe, Michael Suk-Young; Chwe, Michael Suk-Young
2014., 20140323, 2014, 2013-04-21, 2014-03-23
eBook
Game theory-the study of how people make choices while interacting with others-is one of the most popular technical approaches in social science today. But as Michael Chwe reveals in his insightful ...new book, Jane Austen explored game theory's core ideas in her six novels roughly two hundred years ago-over a century before its mathematical development during the Cold War.Jane Austen, Game Theoristshows how this beloved writer theorized choice and preferences, prized strategic thinking, and analyzed why superiors are often strategically clueless about inferiors. Exploring a diverse range of literature and folktales, this book illustrates the wide relevance of game theory and how, fundamentally, we are all strategic thinkers.
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