This volume brings together nineteen essays that marked the bicentenary of Jane Austen's birth and reflect twentieth-century critical attitudes.

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.

An engaging account of how Jane Austen became a household name. Just how did Jane Austen become the celebrity author and the inspiration for generations of loyal fans she is today? Devoney Looser's The Making of Jane Austen turns to the people, performances, activism, and images that fostered Austen's early fame, laying the groundwork for the beloved author we think we know. Here are the Austen influencers, including her first English illustrator, the eccentric Ferdinand Pickering, whose sensational gothic images may be better understood through his brushes with bullying, bigamy, and an attempted matricide. The daring director-actress Rosina Filippi shaped Austen's reputation with her pioneering dramatizations, leading thousands of young women to ventriloquize Elizabeth Bennet's audacious lines before drawing room audiences. Even the supposedly staid history of Austen scholarship has its bizarre stories. The author of the first Jane Austen dissertation, student George Pellew, tragically died young, but he was believed by many, including his professor-mentor, to have come back from the dead. Looser shows how these figures and their Austen-inspired work transformed Austen's reputation, just as she profoundly shaped theirs. Through them, Looser describes the factors and influences that radically altered Austen's evolving image. Drawing from unexplored material, Looser examines how echoes of that work reverberate in our explanations of Austen's literary and cultural power. Whether you're a devoted Janeite or simply Jane-curious, The Making of Jane Austen will have you thinking about how a literary icon is made, transformed, and handed down from generation to generation.

Offers a radical new thesis about Jane Austen's construction of her art and recreates substantial area of her mental and imaginative life.

This elegant and thoughtful work offers an important new way of understanding Jane Austen by defining the fundamental impact and influence of British Romanticism on her later novels. In comparing the earlier and later phases of Austen's career, Deresiewicz addresses an important yet neglected issue regarding her work: the longstanding critical consensus that Austen's last three novels (Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion) represent far greater artistic achievements than do her first three (Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice). Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets offers a rich account of the differences between the two phases of Austen's career. In doing so, it contextualizes her later novels within the British Romantic movement and the works of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, and Byron. Through close readings of Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion, Deresiewicz reveals the importance of Romantic ideas in Austen's later work, considering the ways in which the novels investigate hidden mechanisms of psychic and affective life, including "substitution," "ambiguous relationships," and "widowhood." Deresiewicz's innovative approach and its emphasis on Romanticism opens up new perspectives on Austen's later novels by exploring their patterns of imagery, narrative logics, and social and historical dimensions.

A comprehensive look at the academic criticism of Jane Austen from her time down to the present. Among the most important English novelists, Jane Austen is unusual because she is esteemed not only by academics but by the reading public. Her novels continue to sell well, and films adapted from her works enjoy strong box-officesuccess. The trajectory of Austen criticism is intriguing, especially when one compares it to that of other nineteenth-century English writers. At least partly because she was a woman in the early nineteenth century, she was longneglected by critics, hardly considered a major figure in English literature until well into the twentieth century, a hundred years after her death. Yet consequently she did not suffer from the reaction against Victorianism thatdid so much to hurt the reputation of Dickens, Tennyson, Arnold, and others. How she rose to prominence among academic critics - and has retained her position through the constant shifting of academic and critical trends - is a story worth telling, as it suggests not only something about Austen's artistry but also about how changes in critical perspective can radically alter a writer's reputation. Laurence W. Mazzeno is President Emeritus of Alvernia University, Reading, Pennsylvania.

Origins for Persuasion -- The reviser at work : MS chapter 10 to chapters X-XI (1818) -- At the White Hart : MS chapter 11 to chapter XII (1818) -- The history of Buonaparte -- Domestic virtues and national importance -- A critique on Walter Scott -- Prejudice on the side of ancestry -- The worth of Lyme -- The white glare of Bath -- Conclusion: Meaning to have spring again.

A comprehensive guide to Austen's works in the contexts of her contemporary world and present-day criticism.

The Norton Critical Edition of Pride and Prejudice has been revised to reflect the most current scholarly approaches to Austen’s most widely read novel. The text is that of the 1813 first edition, accompanied by revised and expanded explanatory annotations. This Norton Critical Edition also includes: · Biographical portraits of Austen by members of her family and, new to the Fourth Edition, those by Jon Spence (Becoming Jane Austen) and Paula Byrne (The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things). · Fourteen critical essays, eleven of them new to the Fourth Edition, reflecting the finest current scholarship. Contributors include Janet Todd, Andrew Elfenbein, Felicia Bonaparte, and Tiffany Potter, among others. · “Writers on Austen”—a new section of brief comments by Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, and others. · A Chronology and revised and expanded Selected Bibliography.