Response of Richard Handler and Daniel Segal to John Halperin's review of Jane Austen and the Fiction of Culture in Eighteenth-Century Fiction 4 (1991), 81-83

1992 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 351-352
Author(s):  
Richard Handler ◽  
Daniel Segal
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Jane Austen

The History of Missed Opportunities

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
William H. Galperin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
Missed Opportunities ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Everyday World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Multiple Levels

This study is about the emergence of the everyday as both a concept and a material event and about the practices of retrospection in which it came to awareness in the romantic period in “histories” of the missed, the unappreciated, the overlooked. Prior to this moment everyday life was both unchanging and paradoxically unpredictable. By the late eighteenth century, however, as life became more predictable and change on a technological and political scale more rapid, the present came into unprecedented focus, yielding a world answerable to neither precedent nor futurity. This alternative world soon appears in literature of the period: in the double takes by which the poet William Wordsworth disencumbers history of memory in demonstrating what subjective or “poetic” experience typically overlooks; in Jane Austen, whose practice of revision returns her to a milieu that time and progress have erased and that reemerges, by previous documentation, as something different. It is observable in Lord Byron, thanks to the “history” to which marriage and domesticity are consigned not only in the wake of his separation from Lady Byron but during their earlier epistolary courtship, where the conjugal present came to consciousness (and prestige) as foredoomed but an opportunity nonetheless. The everyday world that history focalizes in the romantic period and the conceptual void it exposes in so doing remains a recovery on multiple levels: the present is both “a retrospect of what might have been” (Austen) and a “sense,” as Wordsworth put it, “of something ever more about to be.”

Jane Austen’s Questioning of Gender and Genres

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie-Laure MASSEI-CHAMAYOU
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Conduct Books ◽  
Northanger Abbey ◽  
Gothic Novels ◽  
Opposite View

If Jane Austen admits in her correspondence that she was eventually pleased with Thomas Gisborne’s Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (1797), the Anglican theologian nonetheless endorsed the prejudices shared by most eighteenth-century moralists towards novels. Now, in Northanger Abbey, a novel filled with literary allusions, Jane Austen’s narrator bravely takes the opposite view by launching into a bold defence of the genre. Besides resorting to a biting irony to scrutinize her society’s axioms, rules and power relations, her novels notably question Manichean representations of masculine and feminine roles. Jane Austen’s choice to distance herself from the strictly gendered models inherited from conduct books, sentimental, or gothic novels, further combines with her questioning of generic conventions. This article thus aims at exploring how Jane Austen engaged with these representations while articulating her subtle didacticism. Her aim was not merely to raise the respectability of the novel genre, but also to provide a possible answer to the crisis of values that was threatening the very foundations of the political and social order.

The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth-Century Novel

2013 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Book Production ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Hegemony ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
English Novel ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Insight Into

Although the emergence of the English novel is generally regarded as an eighteenth-century phenomenon, this is the first book to be published professing to cover the ‘eighteenth-century English novel’ in its entirety. This Handbook surveys the development of the English novel during the ‘long’ eighteenth century—in other words, from the later seventeenth century right through to the first three decades of the nineteenth century when, with the publication of the novels of Jane Austen and Walter Scott, ‘the novel’ finally gained critical acceptance and assumed the position of cultural hegemony it enjoyed for over a century. By situating the novels of the period which are still read today against the background of the hundreds published between 1660 and 1830, this Handbook covers not only those ‘masters and mistresses’ of early prose fiction—such as Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Burney, Scott, and Austen—who are still acknowledged to be seminal figures in the emergence and development of the English novel, but also the significant number of recently rediscovered novelists who were popular in their own day. At the same time, its comprehensive coverage of cultural contexts not considered by any existing study, but which are central to the emergence of the novel—such as the book trade and the mechanics of book production, copyright and censorship, the growth of the reading public, the economics of culture both in London and in the provinces, and the reprinting of popular fiction after 1774—offers unique insight into the making of the English novel.

Romantic Readers

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felicity James
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
Book Trade ◽  
Samuel Johnson ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Reading Habits ◽  
Technological Advances ◽  
Lyrical Ballads ◽  
Eighteenth Century Britain ◽  
The Cost

This chapter examines both the excitement and the anxieties associated with Romantic reading. Thanks to increased literacy, heightened competition in the book trade, and technological advances in printing, eighteenth-century Britain had transformed itself into ‘a nation of readers’, as Samuel Johnson observed in his Lives of the English Poets. This chapter explores what the Romantic nation was reading and how it obtained its books, looking at different forms of libraries and book societies, and at the circulation and the cost of books. It discusses recent critical advances in understanding the complexities of reading practices, and sets these in a wider context of the thematization of reading in the period. The presentation of the Romantic reader is analysed through a range of texts from Lyrical Ballads to the letters of Jane Austen and Charles Lamb. These are placed alongside the testimonies of readers themselves and the traces of reading habits revealed by diaries, reviews, and library records.

The Wearing of the Red: The Redcoat and the British Brand

Costume ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nigel Arch
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
Polite Society ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation

As a concept, the idea of product branding offers insights into the history of uniform in Britain. The creation of a brand, by which a product is understood and recognised by its name, fits the cultural history of the red coat, that part of his uniform by which the British infantryman was known for over three hundred years. While the earliest references to the redcoat in this context occur in the sixteenth century, it is really from the eighteenth century onwards that the term becomes widely employed to denote the soldier. However, a review of royal portraiture in Britain from the late seventeenth century onwards also reveals that monarchs used the red coat as a way of uniting the ideals of patriotism with the monarch — a device that was particularly important for the Hanoverian dynasty. Both literature and the visual arts helped identify the red coat as a synonym for the soldier. Numerous references may be adduced, from Jane Austen writing of polite society, to Rudyard Kipling's Tommy. Lady Elizabeth Butler was perhaps the most famous artist to depict red-coated heroes in battles, which marked the defence or development of the Empire.

scholarly journals Interpreting Jane Austen’s Writing Style: Adaptations of the Novel Northanger Abbey

2020 ◽  
pp. 221-233
Author(s):  
Hlushchenko Olena Volodymyrivna ◽  
Kornielaieva Yevheniia Valeriivna ◽  
Moskaliuk Olena Viktorivna
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Research Paper ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Writing Style ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
Northanger Abbey ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Spelling Word

The research paper focused on revealing the individual writing style of Jane Austen based on the novel Northanger Abbey and interpretations of its various adaptations. The purpose of the article is to prove that the individual author’s style can be reconstructed due to different stylistic devices that help the reader to understand the message of a literary work more profoundly and take into account in the process of film adaptations. An author’s style is characterized by numerous factors including spelling, word choices, sentence structures, punctuation, use of literary stylistic devices (irony, metaphors, rhyme, etc.) and organization of ideas, narration structure, and overall tone of the narration. The main analytic procedures used in the research are keyness, collocation, and cluster. The authors also define that the novel under analysis is a parody of Gothic fiction. The author ruined the conventions of eighteenth-century novels by making her heroine fall in love with the character before he has a serious thought of her and exposing the heroine’s romantic fears and curiosities as groundless. The article deals with adaptation as an integral part of the concept of intersemiotic translation. It is possible to say that adaptation is an attempt to translate the content of the adapted material into its screening; intersemiotic translation focuses on the analysis and interpretation of semiotic codes in the scope of adapted material. Seven basic operations used to differentiate the range of adaptation are substitution, reduction, addition, amplification, inversion, transaccentation, compression.

‘Full of pretty stories’: Fiction in the Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny DiPlacidi
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
Frances Burney ◽  
Charlotte Smith ◽  
Domestic Novel ◽  
Cultural Form ◽  
Derivative Work ◽  
Serial Fiction

Magazine fiction in eighteenth-century periodical publications such as the Lady’s Magazine has, on the whole, been disparaged as unoriginal, derivative work produced by amateurs. Jenny DiPlacidi’s essay robustly contests these claims by demonstrating how a range of sentimental, Gothic, epistolary and experimental short and serial fiction in the Magazine thematically, tonally and stylistically influenced the novels of canonical figures such as Jane Austen, Frances Burney and Charlotte Smith. Magazine fiction in periodicals such as the Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832) and Lady’s Monthly Museum (1798–1828), DiPlacidi argues, was, in the main, innovative and original. Far from being ephemeral, this fiction was an enduring and significant cultural form, which stylistically and thematically helped to shape the Romantic and domestic novel.

Jane Austen and the Tradition of Masculine Benevolence

2021 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-94
Author(s):  
Marilyn Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Needy

During the long eighteenth century, benevolence was thought to be the greatest of all virtues. In her later novels especially, Jane Austen emphasized its primacy, showing that benevolence must be taught, practiced, and perfected through rigorous self-analysis and the repudiation of self-indulgence. The heroes of those novels tend to exercise benevolence in accordance with the duties of their profession, especially as described in the courtesy books of the period. Nevertheless, even if adept at helping the needy or extending kindness toward their peers, her central male characters do not find happiness until they discipline themselves to be more benevolent toward people of all ranks. Although the novels do not advocate a political solution for ending poverty, Austen suggests that her readers can improve society through benevolent action.

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