What Jane Austen Ate And Charles Dickens Knew

A “delightful reader’s companion” (The New York Times) to the great nineteenth-century British novels of Austen, Dickens, Trollope, the Brontës, and more, this lively guide clarifies the sometimes bizarre maze of rules and customs that governed life in Victorian England. For anyone who has ever wondered whether a duke outranked an earl, when to yell “Tally Ho!” at a fox hunt, or how one landed in “debtor’s prison,” this book serves as an indispensable historical and literary resource. Author Daniel Pool provides countless intriguing details (did you know that the “plums” in Christmas plum pudding were actually raisins?) on the Church of England, sex, Parliament, dinner parties, country house visiting, and a host of other aspects of nineteenth-century English life—both “upstairs” and “downstairs. An illuminating glossary gives at a glance the meaning and significance of terms ranging from “ague” to “wainscoting,” the specifics of the currency system, and a lively host of other details and curiosities of the day.

Searching for Jane Austen demolishes with wit and vivacity the often-held view of Jane, a decorous maiden aunt writing her small drawing-room stories of teas and balls. Emily Auerbach presents a different Jane Austen--a brilliant writer who, despite the obstacles facing women of her time, worked seriously on improving her craft and became one of the world's greatest novelists, a master of wit, irony, and character development. In this beautifully illustrated and lively work, Auerbach surveys two centuries of editing, censoring, and distorting Austen's life and writings. Auerbach samples Austen's flamboyant, risqué adolescent works featuring heroines who get drunk, lie, steal, raise armies, and throw rivals out of windows. She demonstrates that Austen constantly tested and improved her skills by setting herself a new challenge in each of her six novels. In addition, Auerbach considers Austen's final irreverent writings, discusses her tragic death at the age of forty-one, and ferrets out ridiculous modern adaptations and illustrations, including ads, cartoons, book jackets, newspaper articles, plays, and films from our own time. An appendix reprints a ground-breaking article that introduced Mark Twain's Jane Austen, an unfinished and unforgettable essay in which Twain and Austen enter into mortal combat.

The author of the critically hailed "What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew" takes readers on an engaging, high-spirited romp through Victorian England to expose the very human side of Dickens, the Brontes, Thackeray, and other great literary figures of the time. Illustrations.

Jane Austen and Altruism identifies a compelling theme, namely, the view that Jane Austen propounds a rigorous, boundary-sensitive model of altruism that counters the human propensity to selfishness and promotes the culture of cooperation. In her days, altruism was commonly known as "benevolence", "charity," or "philanthropy", and these concepts overlap with Auguste Comte’s later definition of altruism as "otherism". This volume argues that Austen’s thinking co-opts the evolutionary idea that altruism is seldom truly pure, egoism cannot be eradicated, and boundless group altruism is not sustainable. However, given that she comes from a naval and clergy family, she witnesses the power of wartime patriotism, the Evangelical revival, the Regency culture of politeness, and the sentimental novels. In her novels, she locates human relationships along an altruism continuum that ranges from enlightened selfishness to pathological altruism. Unconditional love is hard to find, but empathy, kin altruism, reciprocal exchange, and group altruism are key to the formation of self-identity, family, community and the nation state.

A fantastically vast and witty companion to everything you need to know about Jane Austen, presented in a wonderfully fun and entertaining style which will appeal to all readers.

Jane Austen and Charles Dickens are the quintessential English novelists, and their place among the very greatest authors is beyond dispute. Yet both also wrote histories of England, Austen as an adolescent satire and Dickens as an entertaining book for children. This book brings these fascinating pieces of historical writing together, providing two very different perspectives on the history of England.Jane Austen launches into her satirical history with breathtaking speed and a touching informality, wielding her trademark wit to summarise and satirise the career of every monarch from Henry IV to Charles I. It is also a rarely seen and revealing glimpse of Austen's precocious talent.Dickens's gory and dramatic history is full of villains and heroes. He sketches the lives of Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I with typically flamboyant twists and turns. It is a hugely evocative piece, both of the history he conjures up and of the time in which he himself was writing.David Starkey's fascinating introduction explores the merits of each history. It is the perfect opening to two thoroughly engaging and enthralling histories of England.

In Matters of Fact in Jane Austen: History, Location, and Celebrity, Janine Barchas makes the bold assertion that Jane Austen’s novels allude to actual high-profile politicians and contemporary celebrities as well as to famous historical figures and landed estates. Barchas is the first scholar to conduct extensive research into the names and locations in Austen’s fiction by taking full advantage of the explosion of archival materials now available online. According to Barchas, Austen plays confidently with the tension between truth and invention that characterizes the realist novel. Of course, the argument that Austen deployed famous names presupposes an active celebrity culture during the Regency, a phenomenon recently accepted by scholars. The names Austen plucks from history for her protagonists (Dashwood, Wentworth, Woodhouse, Tilney, Fitzwilliam, and many more) were immensely famous in her day. She seems to bank upon this familiarity for interpretive effect, often upending associations with comic intent. Barchas re-situates Austen’s work closer to the historical novels of her contemporary Sir Walter Scott and away from the domestic and biographical perspectives that until recently have dominated Austen studies. This forward-thinking and revealing investigation offers scholars and ardent fans of Jane Austen a wealth of historical facts, while shedding an interpretive light on a new aspect of the beloved writer's work. -- Joseph Roach, Sterling Professor of Theater and English, Yale University, and author of It

A Study Guide for Charles Dickens' "Nicholas Nickleby," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.