Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Romancing Jane AustenIntroduction: The Persistence of Jane Austen’s Romance

Romancing Jane Austen: Introduction: The Persistence of Jane Austen’s Romance [If the English eighteenth century is understood as a period of social and material reform on an unprecedented scale, characterised by discourses of individual ‘rights’ and ‘egalitarianism’, of ‘rationality’ and ‘liberty’, wrought through struggles between traditionally oppressive social structures and emergent forms of individual consciousness, then Jane Austen seems a rather arbitrary literary expression of English enlightenment. To receive her six famous novels from this perspective, we would expect to find tropes that herald the great political, social, material, philosophical and economic changes taking place in her lifetime, and the lifetime of her narratives; echoes or displaced imprints of the calls for — or resistances to — freedom from accrued tradition, and increased demand for liberty of thought. One of the most overwhelming facts about these six novels, however, remains their overt indifference at the level of content in the great social, economic, political or material events forming their immediate context. This has always been an interesting absence, given the author’s credentials as an intelligent and literate woman. The absence becomes more visible when we remember the naval brothers who had seen action against the French, chased real pirates, carried bullion for the East India Company, and just missed the Battle of Trafalgar; or the cousin married to a French aristocrat guillotined in 1794.24] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

Romancing Jane AustenIntroduction: The Persistence of Jane Austen’s Romance

Part of the Language, Discourse, Society Book Series
Tauchert, Ashley
Romancing Jane Austen — Oct 10, 2015
Download PDF
25 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/springer-journals/romancing-jane-austen-introduction-the-persistence-of-jane-austen-s-YbOSOG0EZP

References (4)

Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan UK
Copyright
© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2005
ISBN
978-1-349-54635-0
Pages
1 –26
DOI
10.1057/9780230599697_1
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[If the English eighteenth century is understood as a period of social and material reform on an unprecedented scale, characterised by discourses of individual ‘rights’ and ‘egalitarianism’, of ‘rationality’ and ‘liberty’, wrought through struggles between traditionally oppressive social structures and emergent forms of individual consciousness, then Jane Austen seems a rather arbitrary literary expression of English enlightenment. To receive her six famous novels from this perspective, we would expect to find tropes that herald the great political, social, material, philosophical and economic changes taking place in her lifetime, and the lifetime of her narratives; echoes or displaced imprints of the calls for — or resistances to — freedom from accrued tradition, and increased demand for liberty of thought. One of the most overwhelming facts about these six novels, however, remains their overt indifference at the level of content in the great social, economic, political or material events forming their immediate context. This has always been an interesting absence, given the author’s credentials as an intelligent and literate woman. The absence becomes more visible when we remember the naval brothers who had seen action against the French, chased real pirates, carried bullion for the East India Company, and just missed the Battle of Trafalgar; or the cousin married to a French aristocrat guillotined in 1794.24]

Published: Oct 10, 2015

Keywords: East India Company; Happy Ending; Feminist Epistemology; Free Indirect Discourse; Narrative Work

There are no references for this article.