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.
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.
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.
Des! acuzä generalizarea unui model de cercetare inadecvat stiintelor sociale si umaniste (consideränd totusi interdisciplinaritatea о cale validä de studiu), Mihaela Ursa nu cedeazä retoricii ...alarmiste atât de prezente în domeniul nostru, ale cärui reflexe conservatoare nu se dezmint. Pe de о parte, vorbim de agregäri complexe de produse culturale gândite ca niste completäri ale unei lumi fictionale initiale, precum este jocul video Dante's Inferno, „prelungire" a operei marelui florentin, sau de universul cinematic Marvel, continând fire narative desprinse dintr-o pletorä de cärti de comics, dar si din vari! surse literare (Edda islandezä). Pe de altä parte, о ramificatie de mare complexitate în interiorul unei storyworld este si fandomul, care rezumä si completeazä dezvoltäri cinematografice de tip saga (precum Game of Thrones în competenta Wiki of Westerns'), aläturi de alte dezvoltäri si concretizäri de storyworlds din cele mal spectaculoase, precum „congresele" (convention) fanilor Star Wars sau reenactments ale episoadelor istorice de felul bätäliilor din Räzboiul Civil american, re-mediate ele însele prin intermediari textual!. Toemai mergând la púnetele nodale ale retelei transmediale, speculând glitch-urüe si folosindu-si competentele recunoscute, cercetarea literarä poate obtine rezultate care nu doar sä о „valideze" într-o epoeä postdisciplinarä si în orice caz postliterarä, ci sä recalibreze cercetarea literarä însâsi, valorificând chiar únele dintre zonele ei centrale, canonice.
Can Jane Austen only be fully understood in English? In Jane Austen Speaks Norwegian, Sørbø compares novels and their translations, while also discussing the strategies chosen by translators of ...literature. Readership: Students and researchers of English literature and translation, Jane Austen societies, and women's studies and reception studies groups.
This book presents Jane Austen as a radical innovator. It explores the nature of her confrontation with the popular novelists of her time, and demonstrates how her challenge to them transformed ...fiction. It is evident from letters and other sources, as well as the novels themselves, that the Austen family developed a strong scepticism about contemporary notions of the proper content and purpose of fiction. Austen's own writing can be seen as a conscious demonstration of these disagreements. In thus identifying her literary motivation, this book (moving away from the questions of ideology which have so dominated Austen studies in this century) offers a unifying critique of the novels and helps to explain their unequalled durability with the reading public.
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