Jane Austen

2019

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, 2019

Jane Austen (1775–1817) is a writer with a global reputation. She is one of a very few writers to enjoy both a wide popular readership and critical acclaim, and one of even fewer writers of her period whose name has instant recognition. Her literary reputation rests on six novels—Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), Northanger Abbey (1818), and Persuasion (1818)—a handful of unfinished works, and three manuscript notebooks of juvenilia, but this small oeuvre has been translated into almost every known language, has been adapted for film and television across the world, and has spawned an enormous number of sequels, prequels, spin-offs, remediations, and other fan fictions in both print and digital media. Critics have, for more than two centuries, attempted both to describe the technical brilliance of Austen’s work and to account for her surprising popularity with very diverse audiences. Her works describe the daily realities o...

2015

Jane Austen’s Heroines--and Some Others Jane Austen is the earliest English novelist whose novels are still widely read today; in fact, they are becoming more popular all the time. Of course, there are good reasons for this popularity. Apart from Austen’s creation of unforgettable characters, and her exquisite irony and sense of humor, there is one other thing I’d like to discuss today: her heroines could be called, in a sense, brilliant (and often unorthodox) adaptations of universally recognized types. For example, Elizabeth Bennet is so remarkable a character because she is, at the same time, a sort of Cinderella and a sort of anti-Cinderella, just as her Prince Charming is also anti-Prince Charming. In other words, Austen deals with types and plots that were old even in her time, but she gives them certain ingenious twists. There are, however, other women novelists that deserve to be read today. Austen herself read and admired their works, and was influenced by them in her own f...

Here is the bibliography of my book Jane Austen: Closet Classicist

Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 2000

The Sewanee Review, 2016

Springer eBooks, 2019

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.

2016

The essay begins by asserting that fiction is persuasion—subtle, indirect, undogmatic, nevertheless it has designs on the reader and is a mode of communication. The example of Jane Austen gives particular illustrations of persuasion as a subject, including self-persuasion (in Emma); the easy persuasion of an unresisting subject (in Sense and Sensibility); and difficult and unwelcome persuasion (in Persuasion).