Endnotes.JaneAusten.ClosetClassicist.docx (original) (raw)
Jane Austen, queer theory and the return of the author - edited version
Introducing a special issue of Women's Writing on Jane Austen, Mary Waldron warns of "two dangers…in the ease with which critics currently feel able to pick any aspect of human life and employ it in some disquisition about Austen." The "more serious" pitfall-which Waldron calls "the "why-not" approach"-involves "the identification of supposed oblique references within Austen"s texts which provide links with issues of present-day concern, often involving strained and unlikely interpretations of language and allusion." As an instance she cites Susan M. Korba"s cry of "Why shouldn't Emma be a lesbian?"-a question which depends, in Waldron"s view, "on what is not in the text" and which therefore risks "identifying a novel which Austen might perhaps have written, but didn"t." 1
Through a close reading of Jane Austen’s last four completed novels, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion, the importance of character studies in literary criticism is highlighted. It is claimed that Austen’s heroines all epitomise a central concern with the possibility of personal freedom and growth in a restrictive society and a central observance of strive for truthfulness in human interaction. Going behind the romantic outer layer of each novel, this thesis analyses the narrative ploys applied to demonstrate the main characters’ need to fight for personal fulfilment as uncorrupted self-realisation. This reading underlines the author’s use of irony both on a textual, inter-textual and meta-level that explains the on-going research interest in her oeuvre. Unlike the majority of modern Austen studies, this thesis argues for the centrality of a character studies approach that focuses on the agency of Austen’s main characters. Regarding character studies as a valuable synergetic force in Austen studies, the heroines are seen as central to the novels’ message and narratology; style and composition are analysed as part of character studies rather than the other way around. In this context, some of Austen’s influential narratological devices such as free indirect speech, impressionistic dramatic effect, and ellipsis are analysed and a need for a new awareness of character in literary theory is underlined. The role of the narrator in connection to the author and reader and Austen’s manipulation with both in-text characters and reader through her narrator show how the act of reading in general, and specifically the act of reading character within the novels, are closely linked. Studying Austen’s mature work underlines the benefits of reading as authorial readers. This thesis claims that Austen’s deep concern with morally sound value systems and her main characters’ integrity stems from a number of philosophical and religious influences that can be described as a neo-Aristotelian outlook.
Jane Austen and her Readers, 1786–1945
2009
Jane Austen and her Readers, 17861945 is a study of the history of reading Jane Austens novels. It discusses Austens own ideas about books and readers, the uses she makes of her reading, and the aspects of her style that are related to the ways in which she has been read. The volume considers the role of editions and criticism in directing readers responses, and presents and analyses a variety of source material related to the ordinary readers who read Austens works between 1786 and 1945.
Austen: Feminist and Revolutionist - An Annotated Bibliography
2019
Jane Austen portrays her novel heroines as outliers in the patriarchal society of Regency Britain. For example, in "Pride and Prejudice" (1813), Elizabeth Bennet chose to marry for love and not merely in pursuit of economic security, which is a flagrant violation of the standards expected of women. Due to strict inheritance laws, women are not able to inherit their family’s properties and so, must turn towards marriage for dependency (or as some critics argue, independency) and capital guarantee in their future. Families often see this as an opportunity to quickly accumulate wealth and push their daughters to marry a man of fine wealth, shaping the “universally acknowledged truth” that marriage is a critical step for women to survive and succeed unbeknownst of their inner desires for marriage shaped by true love and passion. Anyone who deviates from this norm is considered a radical and the voices of these activists are suppressed by the government. Jane Austen was one of the few critics who openly disagrees with the patriarchal expectation of an ideal woman who is to serve the man. She acquires the views of Mary Wollstonecraft’s version of an accomplished woman – one who is seen to be of a rational equal of men and able to make her own independent decisions. In this annotated bibliography, I will explore the arguments of six different critics of Jane Austen’s works, illustrating the main principles that they believe Austen was trying to push through the portrayal and personality of her characters. Some arguments will overlap and I will point out the similar and contrasting understandings between critics to develop a more comprehensive picture of Jane Austen’s liberal feminist ideas of marriage in the novels’ social environments and the thorough examination of the heroines will show that they represent rather unconventional views of marriage.
Women in the 18th Century: Abandoning Patriarchal Systems in Jane Austen
When addressing to Jane Austen’s literature as a feminist heritage, it comes to be quite controversial regarding the actual sense of the word feminist. In the eighteenth century it did not mean the same as it means today in the twenty-first century. Despite the obvious clues that Jane Austen has left to the reader in her works and through her characters, to think about them as a kind of heroines, they are far from the fact of being considered feminists as we would understand the term nowadays. Nevertheless, there are some striking things going on in all of her novels that must be reconsidered: women with more modern and progressive perspectives of English society that seem to be taking new directions and new social roles in the new century. The dependence on the father, brother or husband is not that obligatory anymore.
[Review Essay] Revisiting Three Austen Studies: Close-Reading Morality and Style in Mansfield Park
Fiction and Drama, 2017
In the middle decades of the last century close reading was the reigning literary practice; literary criticism based on that practice goes largely unread now. But, against the grain of the times, close reading had an interestingly “wised up” return in the 1970s and seems now, against the grain of new times, on the cusp of a second return. These returns are “wised up” in the sense that experiences, knowledge, and attitudes collected in the intervening years inform the new close attention given to a text. Jane Austen’s novels were the beneficiaries of illuminating new close readings in the 1970s, readings that address the question of the relation between morality and style, a question that is gaining prominence again in the current “ethical turn” of art, politics, and culture. In their different ways both Stuart Tave and Susan Morgan define the practice and depiction of morality in Austen’s work, and both books deserve to be taken down from library shelves and to be read anew. More recently, against the trend of historicist readings of her work, Austen’s style has received close and thrilling attention from D. A. Miller. His analysis centers on how Austen’s style of narration achieves impersonality to the extent that Austen, with all she knows to say about men, women, and marriage, presents herself—God-like, Neuter—as out of bounds of the reality she narrates. Like any God’s, this style only makes the morality that she rules herself out of absolute. I trace these two returns to close reading with special focus on Mansfield Park, the novel that, long ago, Kingsley Amis condemned as an “immoral book” that could not be saved by the “invigorating coldness” of Jane Austen’s style. This judgment brings up that double question of the curious entanglement of morality and style in Austen’s novel, the question so brilliantly addressed by Tave, Morgan, and Miller.
"Woman Is Fine for Her Own Satisfaction Alone": Fashion in Jane Austen's Letters
Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities, 2013
Covering the span dating from 9 January 1796 to 28 May 1817 and recording all her highly important little matters, Jane Austen’s letters to her sister, Cassandra, and others reflect her never-failing interest in the discourse of apparel. In the opening of this article, I will use the narrator’s sarcastic but oversimplified view of women’s complicated relationships with clothes in Northanger Abbey as well as the picture of the autonomous woman revealed in the letters concerned to point out the title quotation’s double meanings. With a number of instances extracted from the letters and novels by Austen, I will further examine the paradox intrinsic in the two kinds of writings in relation to clothes and argue that the author’s preoccupation with the matter of dress recounted in her life writing stand as counterpoint to the relatively conservative sumptuary notions conveyed in her creative works. Drawing on her epistolary account of fashion and dress, this article will also investigate how Austen managed to play the game of fashion for pleasure and demonstrated her free will through the exertion. In the end, I will maintain that to our fair author, fashion created variations and novelties to relieve her and her loved ones of the humdrum of everyday life. And, her letters simultaneously lay bare the minutiae of her life and attest to the ultra-significance she attached to life’s little things. 本篇論文主要探究涵蓋於奧斯汀(Jane Austen, 1775-1817) 書信，她珍視且暱稱的「我所有的重要瑣事」(all my important nothings)中的時尚議題。此論文首先點出奧斯汀藉《諾桑葛大宅院》(Northanger Abbey, 1817) 敍述者「女為悅己而容」(Woman is fine for her own satisfaction alone)文字嘲諷的表象之外，所傳達的「女性自主」概念；繼而論述奧斯汀在書信中對服裝相關議題的高度關注，與她小說裡相對保守的衣著概念形成強烈且有趣的對比；進而探究在真實生活裡，奧斯汀藉由把玩時尚潮流，展現她的自由意志與自主性。論文的重要性在其成功論證奧斯汀書信和小說兩種書寫對衣著描述上所蘊含的矛盾，以及時尚衣著對她真實生活的重要性。論文主張時尚衣著為奧斯汀和她所愛的人們，增添日常生活的多樣性和新奇感；這些日常瑣事與點滴對奧斯汀而言，具有莫大的意義。
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE AND FEMINIST MOTIVES IN JANE AUSTEN'S NOVELS
This study aims to explore feminist viewpoints in Jane Austen's works in general. As a famous 19 th Century novelist, Jane Austen tried to show the realities of women in her time. The common theme in all Austen's works includes the marriages of young women and the general social class structure of England in the 19 th Century. Jane Austen was a published female novelist who wrote under her own name which can be seen as an important feminist quality. She gifted six novels to readers about women centred in the thoughts, desires and behaviours of them. Besides, new innovations in the 19 th Century literature have also been mentioned in this study. ONDOKUZUNCU YÜZYIL EDEBİYATI VE JANE AUSTEN'IN ROMANLARINDAKİ FEMİNİST MOTİFLER ÖZET Bu çalışma, genel anlamda Jane Austen'in eserlerindeki feminist bakış açısını ortaya çıkarmayı amaçlamaktadır. Ondokuzuncu yüzyılın ünlü romancısı Jane Austen kendi çağının kadınlarının gerçeklerini göstermeye çalışmıştır. Austen'in bütün eserlerindeki ortak tema ondokuzuncu yüzyıl İngilteresi'nin genel sosyal sınıf yapısı ve genç kadınların evlilikleri ile ilgilidir. Jane Austen kendi adı altında yazmış olan kadın romancıdır ve bu özelliği ile önemli bir feminist özellik ortaya koyar. Yazar, okuyuculara kadınların düşüncelerini, taleplerini ve davranışlarını anlatan altı roman bırakmıştır. Bu çalışmada ayrıca ondokuzuncu yüzyıl edebiyat dünyasında meydana gelen yeniliklerden de bahsedilmiştir.
The Blush of Modesty or the Blush of Shame? Reading Jane Austen's Blushes
Forum for Modern Language Studies, 2006
Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body". Even as she rebukes the writers of novels who disown their own creations, the narrator of Jane Austen"s Northanger Abbey famously attempts to rehabilitate the reputation of the female-authored novel, commending Cecilia, Camilla and Belinda, and calling for team spirit. (Northanger Abbey, pp.32-33). 1 Austen rightly recognises an extensive contemporary body of opinion against the novel: "no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are as many as our readers". But she also insists that "our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world" (p.32). Austen reacts in a variety of ways to her contemporaries" diatribes against reading the novel: by attributing a fear of the novel to the idiotic Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice, for example, she neatly exposes the idiocy of the fear; in Northanger Abbey she legitimises the novel by claiming for it the qualities more commonly attributed to the irreproachable periodical essay; by exposing and regendering stereotypes such as that of the girl led astray by romances in Sanditon, she indicates the gendered absurdity of such stereotypes. Her own sane and rational novels, with their emphasis on the domestic and the everyday, and their small cast of characters and limited social milieu, form a corrective both to the more absurd and melodramatic of her contemporaries" works, and also to the critics and readers who tar all novels with the same brush. I would like to suggest here that Jane Austen"s prose style enacts a similar corrective to notions of the novel"s frivolity, demanding the kind of strenuous reading more commonly associated by eighteenth-century moralists with the reading of non-fictional prose. Mary Poovey argues that Austen, like Mary Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft, was driven by the dictates of propriety, as manifested in the domestic ideology, to use strategies of "indirection and accommodation", which appear at the level of content and form "as resolutions blocked at one level of a narrative and then displaced by other subjects that are more amenable to symbolic transformation". An example is "Austen"s imposition of a romantic resolution on the realistic premise of Pride and Prejudice". 2 Throughout this article, I agree with Poovey that Austen employs strategies of indirection that are grounded in conduct-book notions of propriety. Where she sees such strategies as limiting and defensive, however, I argue that they are in fact pleasurable and defiant, forming part of the games of "Ingenuity" that Austen plays with her readers. "I do not write for such dull Elves / As have not a great deal of Ingenuity themselves", Austen
The Tensions of Jane Austen’s Epistolary Style
2020
Jane Austen’s letters contain few insights into her practice or philosophy as a writer. A series of letters in 1814 to her niece Anna offer comments and advice on the ongoing novel which this budding author has sent her aunt for feedback, but these are mainly of a practical nature, concerning such matters as names, titles and etiquette (‘And when Mr Portman is first brought in, he wd not be introduced as the Honble—That distinction is never mentioned at such times;—at least I beleive not’). The majority of the letters which survive are concerned with day-to-day, rather than literary or intellectual, concerns. Jane’s letters to her sister Cassandra in particular are full of commonplace gossip between sisters, which could strike a modern reader as trivial, even frivolous. Their structure and style are, as many critics have noticed, akin to the spontaneity and rapidity of speech. In the novels such breathless letters are frequently a sign of negligent behaviour, even moral weakness. Ho...
THE REAL JANE AUSTEN: AUSTEN'S SHIFTING IMAGE
Cadernos do IL, 2018
ABSTRACT Jane Austen is one of the most important and widely known authors in the English language. Despite her unrelenting fame, very little is known about the actual woman who lived from 1775 to 1816 – her family claimed she led a quiet life and they burned her presumably most compromising letters. Readers and scholars were left with an unfinished sketch by Austen’s sister, Cassandra, later modified to fit the Victorian expectations of what a proper lady ought to be. In 2011, a new portrait was found, one of a mature and independent authoress. This essay aims to look at Austen’s life in order to glimpse at the woman behind the images, understanding how Austen’s image changed alongside her readers, and perhaps because of them. Key-words: Jane Austen, portraits, biography, English Literature.