Jane Austen And The State Rle Jane Austen

Jane Austen is often associated with conservatism and her novels are often seen as light entertainment depicting a vanished world and its manners. Mary Evan's study, first published in 1987, seeks to contradict the conventional wisdom regarding Austen's social and political leanings and argues that far from endorsing established and conservative views Jane Austen advances a radical critique of the morality of bourgeois capitalism and demonstrates a concern for the articulation of women's rights and views whilst simultaneously drawing attention to the vulnerability of women in the economic marketplace. Mary Evans adopts a multidisciplinary approach and her book will appeal to anyone who is interested in Jane Austen's writing as well as those concerned with the moral basis of contemporary politics.

On Jane Austen's view of the state and society.

First published in 1984, John Hardy's important interpretation of Jane Austen's heroines breaks through the accepted tradition of viewing the author as merely a rational comedienne of manners. He argues instead that Jane Austen's greatness lies in her exploration of human relationships through the subtle and original portrayal of her heroines. Jane Austen's heroines come to enjoy a distinctive relationship with the men they eventually marry. Between her lovers the potential exists for the kind of intimacy that leads to a shared privacy. Austen's recognition of this represents her special insight into what is of central importance in human relationships. Her belief that love and friendship are our only hope of triumphing over solitude, and the character and integrity of her heroines, are the major elements which make Jane Austen's novels so satisfying.

First published in 1965, this reissued work by Wendy Craik provides a thorough and extensive study of Jane Austen's six complete novels: Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion. This is a truly groundbreaking study of Austen which, in addition to a close analysis of the novels themselves, also goes on investigate the principles by which Jane Austen selected and arranged her material.

First published in 1965, this work by Wendy Craik provides a thorough and extensive study of Jane Austen's six complete novels.

Originally published in 1994. In The Improvement of the Estate, Alistair Duckworth contends that understanding Mansfield Park is fundamental to appreciating Jane Austen's body of work. Professor Duckworth understands Mansfield Park as underscoring the central uniting theme in Austen's work—her concept of the "estate" and its "improvement." The author illustrates Austen's connection to the values of Christian humanism, which she conveys through the uniting theme of estate improvement. According to Duckworth, the estate represents moral and social heritage, so the manner in which individuals seek to improve their estates in Jane Austen's novels represents the direction in which she saw the state and society moving. Finally, Duckworth underscores Austen's awareness of the importance of a society of individuals whose behavior is socially informed.

Jane Austen and the State of the Nation explores Jane Austen's references to politics and to political economics and concludes that Austen was a liberal Tory who remained consistent in her political agenda throughout her career as a novelist. Read with this historical background, Austen's books emerge as state-of-the-nation or political novels.

One of The Globe and Mail's Best Books of 2020 "A thoroughly authentic, smart and consoling account of one writer’s commitment to another." --The New York Times Book Review (editors' choice) "An absolutely fascinating book: I will never read Austen the same way again." —Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk An astonishingly nuanced reading of Jane Austen that yields a rare understanding of how to live "About seven years ago, not too long before our daughter was born, and a year before my father died, Jane Austen became my only author." In the turbulent period around the birth of her first child and the death of her father, Rachel Cohen turned to Jane Austen to make sense of her new reality. For Cohen, simultaneously grief-stricken and buoyed by the birth of her daughter, reading Austen became her refuge and her ballast. She was able to reckon with difficult questions about mourning, memorializing, living in a household, paying attention to the world, reading, writing, and imagining through Austen’s novels. Austen Years is a deeply felt and sensitive examination of a writer’s relationship to reading, and to her own family, winding together memoir, criticism, and biographical and historical material about Austen herself. And like the sequence of Austen’s novels, the scope of Austen Years widens successively, with each chapter following one of Austen's novels. We begin with Cohen in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she raises her small children and contemplates her father’s last letter, a moment paired with the grief of Sense and Sensibility and the social bonds of Pride and Prejudice. Later, moving with her family to Chicago, Cohen grapples with her growing children, teaching, and her father’s legacy, all refracted through the denser, more complex Mansfield Park and Emma. With unusual depth and fresh insight into Austen’s life and literature, and guided by Austen’s mournful and hopeful final novel, Persuasion, Rachel Cohen’s Austen Years is a rare memoir of mourning and transcendence, a love letter to a literary master, and a powerful consideration of the odd process that merges our interior experiences with the world at large.