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Jane Austen and the Enlightenment
In this first ever study of Jane Austen and the Enlightenment, Peter Knox-Shaw draws out the Enlightenment principles and ideas which lie behind much of Austen's writing. His study offers a startling new perspective on Austen, and is essential reading for all those interested in Austen and her writing.
Jane Austen and the Enlightenment
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.
The Cambridge Companion to 'Pride and Prejudice'
This informative Companion offers a combination of original readings and factual background information.
Jane Austen's Emma
What has Emma Woodhouse, "handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and very little to distress or vex her" to say to a discipline like philosophy? How is a novel like Emma, inaccurately but not infrequently caricatured as a high-toned version of a pedestrian romance, to supply material for philosophical insight or speculation? Jane Austen's Emma is many things to many readers but it is as inaccurate as it is reductive to consider it just a romance. The minutia of daily living on which it concentrates permit not a rehearsal of platitudes, but a closer look at human emotions and motives, as well as the opportunity to hone our interpretive and empathetic skills. Emma flies in the fac...
Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era
In 1768, Captain James Cook made the most important scientific voyage of the eighteenth century. He was not alone: scores of explorers like Cook, travelling in the name of science, brought new worlds and new peoples within the horizon of European knowledge for the first time. Their discoveries changed the course of science. Old scientific disciplines, such as astronomy and botany, were transformed; new ones, like craniology and comparative anatomy, were brought into being. Scientific disciplines, in turn, pushed literature of the period towards new subjects, forms and styles. Works as diverse as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Wordsworth's Excursion responded to the explorers' and scientists' latest discoveries. This wide-ranging and well-illustrated study shows how literary Romanticism arose partly in response to science's appropriation of explorers' encounters with foreign people and places and how it, in turn, changed the profile of science and exploration.
Jane Austen in Context
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.
Jane Austen's Anglicanism
In her re-examination of Jane Austen's Anglicanism, Laura Mooneyham White suggests that engaging with Austen's world in all its strangeness and remoteness reveals the novelist's intensely different presumptions about the cosmos and human nature. While Austen's readers often project postmodern and secular perspectives onto an Austen who reflects their own times and values, White argues that viewing Austen's Anglicanism through the lens of primary sources of the period, including the complex history of the Georgian church to which Austen was intimately connected all her life, provides a context for understanding the central conflict between Austen's malicious wit and her family's testimony to ...
Jane Austen and the Theatre
Jane Austen was fascinated by theatre from her childhood. As an adult she went to the theatre whenever opportunity arose. Scenes in her novels often resemble plays, and recent film and television versions have shown how naturally dramatic her stories are. Yet the myth remains that she was 'anti-theatrical', and readers continue to puzzle about the real significance of the theatricals in Mansfield Park. Penny Gay's book describes for the first time the rich theatrical context of Austen's writing, and the intersections between her novels and contemporary drama. Gay proposes a 'dialogue' in Austen's mature novels with the various genres of eighteenth-century drama - laughing comedy, sentimental comedy and tragedy, Gothic theatre, early melodrama. She re reads the novels in the light of this dialogue to demonstrate Austen's analysis of the pervasive theatricality of the society in which her heroines must perform.
Austen's Oughts
The word is all over Austen's novels: what ought to be done, what one ought to say, how one ought to feel (versus how one does feel). When Austen's characters employ an ought, the delicate oscillation between first- and third-person perspectives that marks her prose leads the reader to distinguish between what they say, and what they ought, according to a morally idealized, third-person calculus, to mean. But what is the context of this ought? This book situates the disinterested, reflective appeal to moral principle invoked_ironically or otherwise_in Austen's oughts within the history of thought about judgment in the British eighteenth century. Beginning with Shaftesbury's critique of Locke's account of judgment, successive readings explore the emphasis on disinterest in works by David Hume, Adam Smith, Samuel Richardson, and Sir Joshua Reynolds alongside discussions of Jane Austen's major novels.
Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets
This elegant and thoughtful work offers an important new way of understanding Jane Austen by defining the fundamental impact and influence of British Romanticism on her later novels. In comparing the earlier and later phases of Austen's career, Deresiewicz addresses an important yet neglected issue regarding her work: the longstanding critical consensus that Austen's last three novels (Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion) represent far greater artistic achievements than do her first three (Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice). Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets offers a rich account of the differences between the two phases of Austen's career. In doing so, it co...
