Fashion and celebrity may be twenty-first century obsessions, but they were also key concepts in Regency culture. Both celebrated and condemned for their popularity, silver fork novels were extremely prolific during this period. This study looks at the social and literary impact of this significant genre.

Fashion and celebrity may be twenty-first century obsessions, but they were also key concepts in Regency culture. Both celebrated and condemned for their popularity, silver fork novels were extremely prolific during this period. This study looks at the social and literary impact of this significant genre.

The Agency of Objects in English Prose, 1789–1832: Conspicuous Things engages with new materialist methodologies to examine shifting perceptions of nonhuman agency in English prose at the turn of the nineteenth century. Examining texts as diverse as it-narratives, the juvenile writings and novels of Jane Austen, De Quincey’s autobiographical writings, and silver fork novels, Nikolina Hatton demonstrates how object agency is viewed in this period as constitutive—not just in regard to human subjectivity but also in aesthetic creation. Objects appear in these novels and short prose works as aids, intermediaries, adversaries, and obstructions, as well as both intimately connected to humans and strangely alien. Through close readings, the book traces how object agency, while sometimes perceived as a threat by authors and characters, also continues to be understood as a source of the delightfully unexpected—in everyday life as well as in narrative.

Indexes the Times, Sunday times and magazine, Times literary supplement, Times educational supplement, Time educational supplement Scotland, and the Times higher education supplement.

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.

This book uses the figure of the Victorian heroine as a lens through which to examine Jane Austen’s presence in Victorian critical and popular writings. Aimed at Victorianist readers and scholars, the book focuses on the ways in which Austen was constructed in fiction, criticism, and biography over the course of the nineteenth century. For the Victorians, Austen became a kind of cultural shorthand, representing a distant, yet not too-distant, historical past that the Victorians both drew on and defined themselves against with regard to such topics as gender, literature, and national identity. Austen influenced the development of the Victorian literary heroine, and when cast as a heroine herself, was deployed in debates about the responsibilities of the novelist and the ability of fiction to shape social and cultural norms. Thus, the study is as much, if not more, about the Victorians than it is about Jane Austen.