Author: Michael Kramp
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000401545
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234
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Book Description
Jane Austen and Critical Theory is a collection of new essays that addresses the absence of critical theory in Austen studies—an absence that has limited the reach of Austen criticism. The collection brings together innovative scholars who ask new and challenging questions about the efficacy of Austen’s work. This volume confronts mythical understandings of Austen as "Dear Aunt Jane," the early twentieth-century legacy of Austen as a cultural salve, and the persistent habit of reading her works for advice or instruction. The authors pursue a diversity of methods, encourage us to build new kinds of relationships to Austen and her writings, and demonstrate how these relationships might generate new ideas and possibilities—ideas and possibilities that promise to expand the ways in which we deploy Austen. The book specifically reminds us of the vital importance of Austen and her fiction for central concerns of the humanities, including the place of the individual within civil society, the potential for new identities and communities, the urgency to address racial and sexual oppression, and the need to imagine more just futures. Chapter 4 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Author: Mimi Marinucci
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442257105
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
Generations of readers have fallen in love with Jane Austen’s timeless tales of eighteenth-century English life. Even casual readers comprehend that these classic novels are not just love stories. They offer keen insights into various aspects of the human condition, such as interpersonal relationships, social conventions, and morality. Jane Austen and Philosophy offers all fans of Austen’s work an introduction to the incredible depth of this English novelist’s stories by probing, for example, the struggles of Elizabeth and Jane Bennett, Emma Woodhouse, and Elinor and Marianne Dashwood as they face societal pressures and their own desires. As the second book in the new Great Authors and Philosophy series,Jane Austen and Philosophy explores questions about morality and duty, propriety and dignity, and obligation and happiness that sheds new light on the works of this classic author and reveals deep issues still relevant to the men and women of society today.
Author: E. M. Dadlez
Publisher: Oxford Studies in Philosophy a
ISBN: 0190689412
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265
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Book Description
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 face of conventional notions of femininity by presenting a heroine with hubris. It shows how friendships can affect one's ways of dealing with the world, how shame can reconfigure self-understanding, how gossip functions in sustaining a community. Emma rehabilitates conceptions of romance by rejecting melodrama in favor of naturalism. It explores the waywardness of the imagination and the myriad ways in which different people with different biases and agendas may evaluate the same evidence. It dwells on the limits of autonomy in that it explores the ease with which one may submit to the will of another. Emma is not itself a work of philosophy. Rather, it leads us to think philosophically. In this volume, a myriad group of scholars and philosophers explore the philosophical resonances of Emma.
Author: Michael Suk-Young Chwe
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691162441
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 290
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Book Description
How the works of Jane Austen show that game theory is present in all human behavior Game theory—the study of how people make choices while interacting with others—is one of the most popular technical approaches in social science today. But as Michael Chwe reveals in his insightful new book, Jane Austen explored game theory's core ideas in her six novels roughly two hundred years ago—over a century before its mathematical development during the Cold War. Jane Austen, Game Theorist shows how this beloved writer theorized choice and preferences, prized strategic thinking, and analyzed why superiors are often strategically clueless about inferiors. Exploring a diverse range of literature and folktales, this book illustrates the wide relevance of game theory and how, fundamentally, we are all strategic thinkers.
Author: Shawn Normandin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000348512
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 246
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Book Description
Jane Austen was one of the most adventurous thinkers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but one would probably never guess that by reading her critics. Perhaps no canonical author in English literature has proven, until now, more resistant to theory. Tracing the political motives for this resistance, Jane Austen and Literary Theory proceeds to counteract it. The book’s detailed interpretations guide readers through some of the important intellectual achievements of Austen’s career—from the stunning teenage parodies "Evelyn" and "The History of England" to her most accomplished novels, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma. While criticism has largely been content to describe the various ways Austen was a product of her time, Jane Austen and Literary Theory reveals how she anticipated the ideas of formidable literary thinkers of the twentieth century, especially Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. Gift and exchange, speech and writing, symbol and allegory, stable irony and Romantic irony—these are just a few of the binary oppositions her dazzling texts deconstruct. Although her novels are major achievements of nineteenth-century realism, critics have hitherto underestimated their rhetorical cunning and their fascination with the materiality of language. Doing justice to Austen’s language requires critical methods as ruthless as her irony, and Jane Austen and Literary Theory supplies these methods. This book will enable both her devotees and her detractors to appreciate her genius in unusual ways.
Author: Janine Barchas
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 1421431599
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 303
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Book Description
Thoroughly innovative and occasionally irreverent, this book will appeal in equal measure to book historians, Austen fans, and scholars of literary celebrity.
Author: Cheryl A. Wilson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429675267
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 623
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Book Description
First published anonymously, as ‘a lady’, Jane Austen is now among the world’s most famous and highly revered authors. The Routledge Companion to Jane Austen provides wide-ranging coverage of Jane Austen’s works, reception, and legacy, with chapters that draw on the latest literary research and theory and represent foundational and authoritative scholarship as well as new approaches to an author whose works provide seemingly endless inspiration for reinterpretation, adaptation, and appropriation. The Companion provides up-to-date work by an international team of established and emerging Austen scholars and includes exciting chapters not just on Austen in her time but on her ongoing afterlife, whether in the academy and the wider world of her fans or in cinema, new media, and the commercial world. Parts within the volume explore Jane Austen in her time and within the literary canon; the literary critical and theoretical study of her novels, unpublished writing, and her correspondence; and the afterlife of her work as exemplified in film, digital humanities, and new media. In addition, the Companion devotes special attention to teaching Jane Austen.
Author: Michael Kramp
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611488672
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 319
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Book Description
Jane Austen and Masculinity is an eclectic collection of contemporary scholarship addressing the representation of men and masculinity in the fiction and popular adaptations of Austen. This anthology includes work by a variety of esteemed and emergent Austen scholars from around the world who engage in a dialogue on critical questions surrounding her fictional treatment of men and masculinity, such as historical (post-French Revolutionary) changes in social expectations for men and women, brothers and fathers, male lovers, soldiers and the military, queer and alternative sexualities, violence, and male devotees of Austen. The collection addresses Austen’s fiction, including her juvenilia, as well as the ongoing popular appeal of her work and the enduring Austen vogue. The work in this anthology builds on established critical discourses in Austen scholarship as well as important conversations in Masculinity Studies.
Author: Kathryn Sutherland
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 9780191555367
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 420
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Book Description
Through three intertwined histories Jane Austen's Textual Lives offers a new way of approaching and reading a very familiar author. One is a history of the transmission and transformation of Jane Austen through manuscripts, critical editions, biographies, and adaptations; a second provides a conspectus of the development of English Studies as a discipline in which the original and primary place of textual criticism is recovered; and a third reviews the role of Oxford University Press in shaping a canon of English texts in the twentieth century. Jane Austen can be discovered in all three. Since her rise to celebrity status at the end of the nineteenth century, Jane Austen has occupied a position within English-speaking culture that is both popular and canonical, accessible and complexly inaccessible, fixed and certain yet wonderfully amenable to shifts of sensibility and cultural assumptions. The implied contradiction was represented in the early twentieth century by, on the one hand, the Austen family's continued management, censorship, and sentimental marketing of the sweet lady novelist of the Hampshire countryside; and on the other, by R. W. Chapman's 1923 Clarendon Press edition of the Novels of Jane Austen, which subjected her texts to the kind of scholarly probing reserved till then for classical Greek and Roman authors obscured by centuries of attrition. It was to be almost fifty years before the Clarendon Press considered it necessary to recalibrate the reputation of another popular English novelist in this way. Beginning with specific encounters with three kinds of textual work and the problems, clues, or challenges to interpretation they continue to present, Kathryn Sutherland goes on to consider the absence of a satisfactory critical theory of biography that can help us address the partial life, and ends with a discussion of the screen adaptations through which the texts continue to live on. Throughout, Jane Austen's textual identities provide a means to explore the wider issue of what text is and to argue the importance of understanding textual space as itself a powerful agent established only by recourse to further interpretations and fictions.
Author: Rachel M. Brownstein
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231153902
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 306
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Book Description
A comparative analysis of the characteristics applied to the early 19th-century classic author includes coverage of how evolving social views have shaped her reputation, the influence of modern interpretations of her work and her ongoing relevance to the literary world.
