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Previous biographies have set Jane Austen within her social context. This biography places her firmly within her professional context as one of an increasing number of women who published novels between 1790 and 1820. Being a professional writer was, apart from her family, more important to Austen than anything else in her life.
Many scholars have written about eighteenth-century English novels, but no one really knows who read them. This study provides historical data on the provincial reading publics for various forms of fiction - novels, plays, chapbooks, children's books, and magazines. Archival records of Midland booksellers based in five market towns and selling printed matter to over thirty-three hundred customers between 1744 and 1807 form the basis for new information about who actually bought and borrowed different kinds of fiction in eighteenth-century provincial England. This book thus offers the first solid demographic information about actual readership in eighteenth-century provincial England, not onl...
This collection of essays covering many aspects of Austen's life, works and historical context provides the fullest introduction in one volume to the life and times of Jane Austen. Jane Austen in Context is a generously illustrated collection of short, lively contributions arranged alphabetically, and covering topics from biography to portraits and agriculture to transport. An essay on the reception of Austen's work is also included, showing how criticism of Austen has responded to literary movements and fashions. The volume emphasises the subtle interactions between Austen's life and times and her novels. This is a work of reference that readers and scholars of Austen will turn to again and again.
This book concerns two men, a stockingmaker and a magistrate, who both lived in a small English village at the turn of the nineteenth century. It focuses on Joseph Woolley the stockingmaker, on his way of seeing and writing the world around him, and on the activities of magistrate Sir Gervase Clifton, administering justice from his country house Clifton Hall. Using Woolley's voluminous diaries and Clifton's magistrate records, Carolyn Steedman gives us a unique and fascinating account of working-class living and loving, and getting and spending. Through Woolley and his thoughts on reading and drinking, sex, the law and social relations, she challenges traditional accounts which she argues have overstated the importance of work to the working man's understanding of himself, as a creature of time, place and society. She shows instead that, for men like Woolley, law and fiction were just as critical as work in framing everyday life.
This collection of essays explores the literary and cinematic implications of translating Austen's prose into film. Contributors raise questions of how prose fiction and cinema differ, of how mass commercial audiences require changes to script and character, and of how continually remade films evoke memories of earlier productions. The essays represent widely divergent perspectives, from literary 'purists' suspicious of filmic renderings of Austen to film-makers who see the text as a stimulus for producing exceptional cinema. This comprehensive study will be of interest to students and teachers alike.
A rollicking review of popular culture in 18th century Britain, this text turns away from sentimental and polite literature to focus instead on the jestbooks, farces, comic periodicals, variety shows and minor comic novels that portray a society in which no subject was taboo and political correctness unimagined.
Book History is the annual journal of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, Inc. (SHARP). Book History is devoted to every aspect of the history of the book, broadly defined as the history of the creation, dissemination, and the reception of script and print. Book History publishes research on the social, economic, and cultural history of authorship, editing, printing, the book arts, publishing, the book trade, periodicals, newspapers, ephemera, copyright, censorship, literary agents, libraries, literary criticism, canon formation, literacy, literacy education, reading habits, and reader response.
A comprehensive guide to Austen's works in the contexts of her contemporary world and present-day criticism.
For Elinor Dashwood, sensible and sensitive, and her romantic younger sister Marianne, the propect of marrying the men they love appears remote. In a world ruled by money and self-interest, the Dashwood sisters have neither fortune nor connections.