eBook

The Historical Austen

William H. Galperin

2011,2003,2013,2005

Overview

Selected byChoicemagazine as an Outstanding Academic Title Jane Austen, arguably the most beloved of all English novelists, has been regarded both as a feminist ahead of her time and as a social conservative whose satiric comedies work to regulate rather than to liberate. Such viewpoints, however, do not take sufficient stock of the historical Austen, whose writings, as William Galperin shows, were more properly oppositional rather than either disciplinary or subversive. Reading the history of her novels' reception through other histories-literary, aesthetic, and social-The Historical Austenis a major reassessment of Jane Austen's achievement as well as a corrective to the historical Austen that abides in literary scholarship. In contrast to interpretations that stress the conservative aspects of the realistic tradition that Austen helped to codify, Galperin takes his lead from Austen's contemporaries, who were struck by her detailed attention to the dynamism of everyday life. Noting how the very act of reading demarcates an horizon of possibility at variance with the imperatives of plot and narrative authority,The Historical Austensees Austen's development as operating in two registers. Although her writings appear to serve the interests of probability in representing \"things as they are,\" they remain, as her contemporaries dubbed them, histories of the present, where reality and the prospect of change are continually intertwined. In a series of readings of the six completed novels, in addition to the epistolaryLady Susanand the uncompletedSanditon, Galperin offers startling new interpretations of these texts, demonstrating the extraordinary awareness that Austen maintained not only with respect to her narrative practice-notably, free indirect discourse-but also with attention to the novel's function as a social and political instrument.

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc,University of Pennsylvania Press
• Subject: 19th century / Austen, Jane, 1715–1817 / Austen, Jane, 1775-1817 -- Criticism and interpretation -- History / Austen, Jane, 1775-1817 -- Knowledge -- History / Austen, Jane, 1775–1817 / Austen, Jane,-1775-1817-Knowledge and learning / Autobiography / Biography / Criticism and interpretation / Cultural Studies / England / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh / European / Great Britain / History / Knowledge / Language & Literature / LITERARY CRITICISM / LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh / LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory / Literature / Literature and history / Literature and history -- England -- History -- 19th century / Literature and history-Great Britain-History-19th century / Women and literature / Women and literature -- England -- History -- 19th century / Women Authors
• ISBN: 9780812219241, 0812219244, 0812236874, 9780812236873, 9780812202014, 0812202015