Austentatious

This collection is concerned with the changing approaches to Jane Austen, her writings, and her afterlives, over the past two hundred years. It reflects on, and broadens understanding of, the cultural reach and reimaginings of Austen in view of the bicentennial celebrations of her published novels from 2011 to 2018. The ten contributors to this collection re-engage with key debates over Austen, her continuing appeal and significance as an author and a lucrative brand, and her cultural ubiquity. These essays are concerned with Austen’s national and international reputation; her critical reception; creative appropriations of her writings; and Austen’s afterlives in popular culture, in visual media, in ephemeral publications, in stage, in film, and in musical versions. Together, these essays by experts from across the UK, North America, Australia, and Scandinavia advance innovative readings of Austen’s novels and her transmedia legacies and shed new light on some of the complex reception processes that emerge from the study of this enduringly popular author. They also set out possible paths for scholarship on Austen in coming years. This book was originally published as a special issue of Women’s Writing.

This volume explores the multiple connections between the two most canonical authors in English, Jane Austen and William Shakespeare. The collection reflects on the historical, literary, critical and filmic links between the authors and their fates. Considering the implications of the popular cult of Austen and Shakespeare, the essays are interdisciplinary and comparative: ranging from Austen’s and Shakespeare’s biographies to their presence in the modern vampire saga Twilight, passing by Shakespearean echoes in Austen’s novels and the authors’ afterlives on the improv stage, in wartime cinema, modern biopics and crime fiction. The volume concludes with an account of the Exhibition “Will & Jane” at the Folger Shakespeare Library, which literally brought the two authors together in the autumn of 2016. Collectively, the essays mark and celebrate what we have called the long-standing “love affair” between William Shakespeare and Jane Austen—over 200 years and counting.

This is the first exploration of the performative and theatrical force of Austen’s work and its afterlife, from the nineteenth century to the present. It unearths new and little-known Austen materials: from suffragette novels and pageants to school and amateur theatricals, passing through mid-twentieth-century representations in Scotland and America. The book concludes with an examination of Austen fandom based on an online survey conducted by the author, which elicited over 300 responses from fans across the globe. Through the lens of performative theory, this volume explores how Austen, her work and its afterlives, have aided the formation of collective and personal identity; how they have helped bring people together across the generations; and how they have had key psychological, pedagogical and therapeutic functions for an ever growing audience. Ultimately, this book explains why Austen remains the most beloved author in English Literature.

While chiefly a site of popular pleasure and merriment, popular culture also offers a profound sense of meaning-making, where it functions as a site and source through which identities are inhabited, brokered and contested. As a significant domain within contemporary society, popular culture is both shaped by and has the capacity to shape developments occurring at the wider social, cultural and political levels of human life. Taking popular culture seriously – as an arena of everyday life that has merit in its own right – the contributors to this wide-ranging collection of essays offer unique insight into various elements of contemporary popular culture. Drawn from across the humanities and social sciences, as well as the performing arts and creative industries, this volume offers theoretical reflections on the significance of particular elements of popular culture: from the performative effects of interactive and immersive theatre, through developments in the shifting cultural landscape of a post-television age, to contemporary popular literature of various sorts and its basis for identity and fandom. Above all else, what these essays demonstrate is the radically porous nature of popular culture, and the ways in which it continually defies attempts at neat categorisation by transcending traditional boundaries and genres.

A comprehensive disctionary of common misusages illustrates the right way and the wrong way to use language and explores why dictionaries do not always provide the correct meaning or usage of a word.

Steaming, funky, and thoroughly modern, Austin, Texas, isn't much like the gardened country estates of Jane Austen's work. But there might be a few similarities in its inhabitants. . . Cate Kendall is no stranger to daydreams of brooding men and fancy parties--after all, she teaches one of her beloved Jane Austen novels in her English classes every year. But as for romance or adventure in her own life, the highlight of most weeks is Scrabble with her cute coworker, Ethan, and he draws the line at witty banter. But Cate is ready for a change. When she finds a mysterious journal that seems to have a link to the soul of the great Jane Austen herself, she knows it's her chance. And she grabs on with both hands. . . Before she knows it, Cate has invented an alter ego with an attitude, attended some seriously chic soirees, and gotten tangled up with a delicious mystery man. And she's uncovered enough unexpected secrets about Ethan that her Scrabble partner has taken to brooding looks and unfathomable silences. It's a positively Austenite predicament, and Cate is sure she'll land in hot water and heartbreak--but maybe not with Jane herself to guide her. . . "Sexy, saucy, fun! Jane Austen would be proud!" --Sophie Jordan, New York Times bestselling author Praise for Austentatious "Frothy, fun, and full of juicy secrets, Alyssa Goodnight's Austen-inspired romp is no Plain Jane." --Erin Blakemore "Will appeal to all Austen fans while bringing a fresh twist with its magic journal." --Booklist "Kept me turning the pages way past my bedtime." --Cindy Jones, author of My Jane Austen Summer

First published anonymously, as ‘a lady’, Jane Austen is now among the world’s most famous and highly revered authors. The Routledge Companion to Jane Austen provides wide-ranging coverage of Jane Austen’s works, reception, and legacy, with chapters that draw on the latest literary research and theory and represent foundational and authoritative scholarship as well as new approaches to an author whose works provide seemingly endless inspiration for reinterpretation, adaptation, and appropriation. The Companion provides up-to-date work by an international team of established and emerging Austen scholars and includes exciting chapters not just on Austen in her time but on her ongoing afterlife, whether in the academy and the wider world of her fans or in cinema, new media, and the commercial world. Parts within the volume explore Jane Austen in her time and within the literary canon; the literary critical and theoretical study of her novels, unpublished writing, and her correspondence; and the afterlife of her work as exemplified in film, digital humanities, and new media. In addition, the Companion devotes special attention to teaching Jane Austen.

In this book, contributors examine media and popular culture forms for and about millennials and Generation Z. Scholars of media studies, popular culture, and sociology will find this book of particular interest.