Jane Austen and the Conditions of Knowledge
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Abstract
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This paper explores the narrative techniques used by Jane Austen, particularly in her six major novels and juvenilia. It examines how Austen's unique approaches to storytelling, such as the use of 'dissolve' transitions and narrative withholding, contribute to a complex understanding of knowledge and communication in her works. By highlighting the strangeness of her fiction and its departure from contemporary norms, the analysis reveals Austen's deep engagement with themes of human cognition and relational dynamics.
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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...
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<i>Jane Austen and the Fiction of Her Time</i> (review)
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She spoke then, on being so entreated. -What did she say? -Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does.
[Review Essay] Revisiting Three Austen Studies: Close-Reading Morality and Style in Mansfield Park
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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.
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