Review of Jane Austen's Cults and Cultures

Persuasions; The Jane Austen Journal, 2009

THE SO-CALLED "SISTER ART" of painting is only softly invoked in Jane Austen's novels, where a glimpse of a portrait, the occasional activity of drawing, or a discussion of aesthetics can augment the author's literary project with language momentarily borrowed from contemporary painterly discourse. As Lance Bertelsen points out, Austen's quiet engagement with comparative aesthetics is not overt: 'Austen does not, with Fielding, cry, 'O, Hogarth, had I thy Pencil!'; nor does she concern herself, a la Dickens, with the graphic illustrations to her works" (351). Still, several of Austen's heroines, particularly Elinor Dashwood and Emma Woodhouse, sketch and draw with aplomb. For some, such artistry suggests a kinship between Austen and particular protagonists. (1) Discussions of the outdoors also draw upon contemporary debates in the related sister-arts of landscaping and painting in Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey, and even Mansfield ...

Women, Popular Culture, and the Eighteenth Century, 2012

Argues for an affinity between the comic sense of Jane Austen and the development of comic prints and caricature. Suggests that a link may be traced through three motifs of fashion, travel, and books and reading.

Women's Writing

Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1818) famously satirizes the excesses of gothic fiction while revealing a patriarchal oppression all the more dangerous because of its subtlety. Although later novels do not so directly translate the drama of the gothic into the drama of the domestic, Austen does continue to suggest how women may be quietly isolated and imprisoned. This article proposes that in Mansfield Park (1814) and Persuasion (1818), Austen gothicizes the very interiority that her heroines have cultivated as an apparent refuge. Austen's portrayal of interiority and its implications for feminism have already been complicated by many critics, but this article demonstrates that Austen herself was well aware of how female interiority could become a trap, a place into which a woman might be forced and cut off from others as assuredly as she would be in any hidden chamber.

2009

‘Jane Austen and her Readers, 1786–1945’ is a study of the history of reading Jane Austen’s novels. It discusses Austen’s 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 Austen’s works between 1786 and 1945.

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.

Miranda, 2021

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.

From: ELH Volume 74, Number 3, Fall 2007 (pp. 655-679). On portraits in the Victorian novel, mimesis and caricature, Lacanian theory and characterization.