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Jane Austen by Alessa Johns
Women's Writing, 2013
The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with p... more The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sublicensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.
is credited with key developments in the novel, including the refinement of free indirect discour... more is credited with key developments in the novel, including the refinement of free indirect discourse, pithy dramatic dialogue, the deft descriptive sketch, and the masterful use of irony.¹ My focus will be on her interest in persuasion. Persuasion permeates the conversations that make up the larger part of Austen's stories, giving center stage to eloquent female protagonists. They and their families, friends, and acquaintances engage in discussions that take up personal matters as well as their communities' critical issues, bringing to life the parlors and ballrooms that in fact are otherwise only fleetingly described. Austen's persuasion relies on forces of personality and conversation more than on longstanding formal rhetoric. She employs a new discursive technology, the novel, to foster a style of civil discourse and behavior that in her view allows for women's participation and makes space for social change. In doing so, Austen's work, as I will suggest, offers insight into contests of persuasion among current feminists as well as the issue of "cancel culture" in our own time. In a Romantic period where, it has been argued, rhetoric was "thoroughly evacuated from the realm of imaginative expression, "² Austen nonetheless created characters whose powers of and responses to persuasion are key to plots, themes, and meanings. Austen encourages readers to ponder the roots of social sway and moral growth-and/or immoral deterioration-stemming from people's capacity to persuade and be persuaded. She focuses not on traditional rhetorical schooling but on the power of interpersonal interaction in everyday social situations and in the effects of the available social media. In particular, from her own experience Austen knew the power of the novel to absorb and influence readers. She understood the anxieties of the novel's detractors about that power, and she defends the genre by engaging those concerns in a comic context. The breezy widow Lady Susan, for instance, "talks very well with a happy command of language, which is too often used, " as her uptight antagonist Catherine Vernon frets, "to make black
Gender and Utopianism by Alessa Johns
WOMEN'S UTOPIAS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ALESSA JOHNS No human society has ever been pe... more WOMEN'S UTOPIAS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ALESSA JOHNS No human society has ever been perfect, a fact that has led thinkers from Plato onward to conceive of utopias both as a fanciful means of escape from an imperfect reality and as a useful tool with which to ...
The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, 2010
8 ALeSSA JOHnS Feminism and utopianism Feminists have joined in celebrating and critiquing utopia... more 8 ALeSSA JOHnS Feminism and utopianism Feminists have joined in celebrating and critiquing utopianism. On the one hand they have profited from the socio-political changes that visions of better societies have impelled; on the other, they have called into ques-tion utopias ...
Historical reflections, 1999, Vol.25 (2), p.307-321, 1999
Genres as Repositories of Cultural Memory, 2000
Reviews by Alessa Johns
Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2015
Utopian Studies, Mar 22, 1998
Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2017
Literature Compass, 2017
As international trade, exploration, and communication proliferated in the 18th and early 19th ce... more As international trade, exploration, and communication proliferated in the 18th and early 19th centuries, a significant group of British intellectual women, the Bluestockings, came to recognize themselves as part of a transnational network. They were attentive especially to intellectual pursuits, women's cultural, sociopolitical, and economic interests, and various forms of social progress, and some of these preoccupations developed over the period and fed into first-wave feminist programs later in the 19th century. I consider the extensive Bluestocking scholarship concentrating on transnationalism as well as recent research that has incorporated international themes. The field of bluestocking studies at this juncture forcefully extends the feminist recovery project and, because of its international interest, might help to counter nationalist and anti-feminist pressures currently challenging the academy.
Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, 2015
Victorian Studies, 2019
Review of The Last Utopians: Four Late Nineteenth-Century Visionaries and Their Legacy by Michael... more Review of The Last Utopians: Four Late Nineteenth-Century Visionaries
and Their Legacy by Michael Robertson, and: William
Morris’s Utopianism: Propaganda, Politics, and
Prefiguration by Owen Holland
The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats
This book is "the most extensive study of Swift's verse to appear in more than thirty years." Why... more This book is "the most extensive study of Swift's verse to appear in more than thirty years." Why is it appearing now? What motivates a new book-length investigation of Swift's poetic oeuvre and achievement? Late in the book,
Mary Wollstonecraft by Alessa Johns
Reverberations of Revolution, 2021
This chapter considers the reception of Mary Wollstonecraft’s work by German-speaking authors. Se... more This chapter considers the reception of Mary Wollstonecraft’s work by German-speaking authors. Several of her books were translated into German by Friedrich Christian Weissenborn, a teacher at the Erziehungsanstalt, an innovative philanthropical school in Schnepfenthal founded by the pastor Christian Gotthilf Salzmann, whose Moralisches Elementarbuch (1783) Wollstonecraft had translated into English in 1790. In his introduction and footnotes to Weissenborn’s 1793–94 translation of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Salzmann attempts to tone down some of Wollstonecraft’s more radical feminist ideas and anti-aristocratic sentiment. In both his translations and his own writings, however, Weissenborn supports her views about women’s roles, though he emphasizes her gradualist vision of social change. Johns concludes by considering the reception of the work by the German-American Forty-Eighter Mathilde Franziska Anneke, who embraces Wollstonecraft’s more radical feminist ideas.
Mary Wollstonecraft in Context, 2020
Reverberations of Revolution: Transnational Perspectives, 1770-1850 ed. Elizabeth Amann & Michael Boyden, 2021
Anna Jameson by Alessa Johns
Translation and Literature, 2010
The German translator of Anna Jameson's Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838) wa... more The German translator of Anna Jameson's Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838) was not Adolph Wagner but Amalie Winter. This prompts reflection on networking within English-German translating activity of this era, and underscores the significance of female translators within it.
Handbook of British Travel Writing, 2020
Anna Jameson's travel writings, popular and oft reprinted, were largely non-fictional texts from ... more Anna Jameson's travel writings, popular and oft reprinted, were largely non-fictional texts from the perspective of a lively narrator, who gave readers immersive experiences via keen observation, trenchant analysis, and an amiable sensitivity to human and non-human subjects. "You make the reader, both as to your internal world and external, live along with yourself, and an excellent companion we find you," wrote one reader (Thomas 1967, 139). Jameson was a trained illustrator; she foregrounded art, literature, and socio-cultural matters and was willing to critique British ways, especially concerning gender inequality. She promoted a transnational epistemology and feminist cosmopolitanism. Instead of a detached internationalism inspired by revolutionary ideas of liberty and fraternity, Jameson favored a grounded, quotidian, and community-oriented understanding. She viewed this as a humanist project to be accomplished through feminine and feminist means, with women's empowerment improving social life in general. Jameson thus aimed to further transnational knowledge and understanding as a way of advancing gender equality and human rights.
Disaster by Alessa Johns
Women's Writing, 2013
The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with p... more The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sublicensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.
is credited with key developments in the novel, including the refinement of free indirect discour... more is credited with key developments in the novel, including the refinement of free indirect discourse, pithy dramatic dialogue, the deft descriptive sketch, and the masterful use of irony.¹ My focus will be on her interest in persuasion. Persuasion permeates the conversations that make up the larger part of Austen's stories, giving center stage to eloquent female protagonists. They and their families, friends, and acquaintances engage in discussions that take up personal matters as well as their communities' critical issues, bringing to life the parlors and ballrooms that in fact are otherwise only fleetingly described. Austen's persuasion relies on forces of personality and conversation more than on longstanding formal rhetoric. She employs a new discursive technology, the novel, to foster a style of civil discourse and behavior that in her view allows for women's participation and makes space for social change. In doing so, Austen's work, as I will suggest, offers insight into contests of persuasion among current feminists as well as the issue of "cancel culture" in our own time. In a Romantic period where, it has been argued, rhetoric was "thoroughly evacuated from the realm of imaginative expression, "² Austen nonetheless created characters whose powers of and responses to persuasion are key to plots, themes, and meanings. Austen encourages readers to ponder the roots of social sway and moral growth-and/or immoral deterioration-stemming from people's capacity to persuade and be persuaded. She focuses not on traditional rhetorical schooling but on the power of interpersonal interaction in everyday social situations and in the effects of the available social media. In particular, from her own experience Austen knew the power of the novel to absorb and influence readers. She understood the anxieties of the novel's detractors about that power, and she defends the genre by engaging those concerns in a comic context. The breezy widow Lady Susan, for instance, "talks very well with a happy command of language, which is too often used, " as her uptight antagonist Catherine Vernon frets, "to make black
WOMEN'S UTOPIAS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ALESSA JOHNS No human society has ever been pe... more WOMEN'S UTOPIAS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ALESSA JOHNS No human society has ever been perfect, a fact that has led thinkers from Plato onward to conceive of utopias both as a fanciful means of escape from an imperfect reality and as a useful tool with which to ...
The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, 2010
8 ALeSSA JOHnS Feminism and utopianism Feminists have joined in celebrating and critiquing utopia... more 8 ALeSSA JOHnS Feminism and utopianism Feminists have joined in celebrating and critiquing utopianism. On the one hand they have profited from the socio-political changes that visions of better societies have impelled; on the other, they have called into ques-tion utopias ...
Historical reflections, 1999, Vol.25 (2), p.307-321, 1999
Genres as Repositories of Cultural Memory, 2000
Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2015
Utopian Studies, Mar 22, 1998
Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2017
Literature Compass, 2017
As international trade, exploration, and communication proliferated in the 18th and early 19th ce... more As international trade, exploration, and communication proliferated in the 18th and early 19th centuries, a significant group of British intellectual women, the Bluestockings, came to recognize themselves as part of a transnational network. They were attentive especially to intellectual pursuits, women's cultural, sociopolitical, and economic interests, and various forms of social progress, and some of these preoccupations developed over the period and fed into first-wave feminist programs later in the 19th century. I consider the extensive Bluestocking scholarship concentrating on transnationalism as well as recent research that has incorporated international themes. The field of bluestocking studies at this juncture forcefully extends the feminist recovery project and, because of its international interest, might help to counter nationalist and anti-feminist pressures currently challenging the academy.
Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, 2015
Victorian Studies, 2019
Review of The Last Utopians: Four Late Nineteenth-Century Visionaries and Their Legacy by Michael... more Review of The Last Utopians: Four Late Nineteenth-Century Visionaries
and Their Legacy by Michael Robertson, and: William
Morris’s Utopianism: Propaganda, Politics, and
Prefiguration by Owen Holland
The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats
This book is "the most extensive study of Swift's verse to appear in more than thirty years." Why... more This book is "the most extensive study of Swift's verse to appear in more than thirty years." Why is it appearing now? What motivates a new book-length investigation of Swift's poetic oeuvre and achievement? Late in the book,
Reverberations of Revolution, 2021
This chapter considers the reception of Mary Wollstonecraft’s work by German-speaking authors. Se... more This chapter considers the reception of Mary Wollstonecraft’s work by German-speaking authors. Several of her books were translated into German by Friedrich Christian Weissenborn, a teacher at the Erziehungsanstalt, an innovative philanthropical school in Schnepfenthal founded by the pastor Christian Gotthilf Salzmann, whose Moralisches Elementarbuch (1783) Wollstonecraft had translated into English in 1790. In his introduction and footnotes to Weissenborn’s 1793–94 translation of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Salzmann attempts to tone down some of Wollstonecraft’s more radical feminist ideas and anti-aristocratic sentiment. In both his translations and his own writings, however, Weissenborn supports her views about women’s roles, though he emphasizes her gradualist vision of social change. Johns concludes by considering the reception of the work by the German-American Forty-Eighter Mathilde Franziska Anneke, who embraces Wollstonecraft’s more radical feminist ideas.
Mary Wollstonecraft in Context, 2020
Reverberations of Revolution: Transnational Perspectives, 1770-1850 ed. Elizabeth Amann & Michael Boyden, 2021
Translation and Literature, 2010
The German translator of Anna Jameson's Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838) wa... more The German translator of Anna Jameson's Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838) was not Adolph Wagner but Amalie Winter. This prompts reflection on networking within English-German translating activity of this era, and underscores the significance of female translators within it.
Handbook of British Travel Writing, 2020
Anna Jameson's travel writings, popular and oft reprinted, were largely non-fictional texts from ... more Anna Jameson's travel writings, popular and oft reprinted, were largely non-fictional texts from the perspective of a lively narrator, who gave readers immersive experiences via keen observation, trenchant analysis, and an amiable sensitivity to human and non-human subjects. "You make the reader, both as to your internal world and external, live along with yourself, and an excellent companion we find you," wrote one reader (Thomas 1967, 139). Jameson was a trained illustrator; she foregrounded art, literature, and socio-cultural matters and was willing to critique British ways, especially concerning gender inequality. She promoted a transnational epistemology and feminist cosmopolitanism. Instead of a detached internationalism inspired by revolutionary ideas of liberty and fraternity, Jameson favored a grounded, quotidian, and community-oriented understanding. She viewed this as a humanist project to be accomplished through feminine and feminist means, with women's empowerment improving social life in general. Jameson thus aimed to further transnational knowledge and understanding as a way of advancing gender equality and human rights.
Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700, 2021
Writing this essay has given me occasion to return to a volume on disasters I edited in 1999, Dre... more Writing this essay has given me occasion to return to a volume on disasters I edited in 1999, Dreadful Visitations: Confronting Natural Catastrophe in the Age of Enlightenment. Having followed successive reports about the Loma Prieta and Northridge earthquakes (1989, 1994), the literal fallout of the Chernobyl disaster (1986), the ecological and humanitarian destruction of the first Gulf War (1990-91), and Hurricane Andrew (1992), I realized that humanists had not amply weighed in on the study of disasters. Instead, the field was dominated by such scientists and social scientists as E.
Bluestocking Feminism and British-German Cultural Transfer, 1750–1837 examines the processes of c... more Bluestocking Feminism and British-German Cultural Transfer, 1750–1837 examines the processes of cultural transfer between Britain and Germany during the Personal Union, the period from 1714 to 1837 when the kings of England were simultaneously Electors of Hanover. While scholars have generally focused on the political and diplomatic implications of the Personal Union, Alessa Johns offers a new perspective by tracing sociocultural repercussions and investigating how, in the period of the American and French Revolutions, Britain and Germany generated distinct discourses of liberty even though they were nonrevolutionary countries. British and German reformists—feminists in particular—used the period’s expanded pathways of cultural transfer to generate new discourses as well as to articulate new views of what personal freedom, national character, and international interaction might be. Johns traces four pivotal moments of cultural exchange: the expansion of the book trade, the rage for ...
Women and Material Culture, 1660–1830, 2007
Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690-1820s, 2018
Ed. Katrin Berndt and Alessa Johns. Handbooks of English and American Studies. Series editors Mar... more Ed. Katrin Berndt and Alessa Johns. Handbooks of English and American Studies. Series editors Martin Middeke, Gabriele Rippl and Hubert Zapf. Berlin: DeGruyter, forthcoming 2021.