Domestic Realities and Imperial Fictions
Domestic Realities and Imperial Fictions

Author: Maaja A. Stewart

Publisher:

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 9780820315409

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"In Domestic Realities and Imperial Fictions, Maaja A. Stewart juxtaposes the discourses of late eighteenth-century domesticity and imperialism to provide an original and compelling reading of Jane Austen's novels. Stewart contends that the sphere of domesticity largely associated with women during this era was constructed alongside - and in complex relation to - the changing socioeconomic conditions of England as a whole. At the center of these changing conditions was the British drive toward empire." "Stewart's double focus on home and empire illuminates the varied ways in which imperialism penetrated the daily lives of women, who were deceptively represented as being largely untouched by England's overseas trade, its conquest of India, and its cultivation of West Indian slave plantations. This focus also illuminates the challenge the imperial enterprise posed to social and ethical systems of the gentry." "Stewart's concrete point of entry to this material is a central narrative in Austen's novels - the struggle for mastery between the older son who inherits the traditional estate and the younger sons who enter various colonial services, gain wealth, and return to contest the supremacy of the older brother. This contest, Stewart argues, transforms the traditional paternal country house into a maternal domestic space. In this context, domesticity reveals itself to be a compensatory realm, a world of denials and false appearances, where the brute realities of imperial domination could be symbolically transformed. By situating the ideologically charged domestic space in the larger context of British imperialism, Stewart shows how the construction of female subjectivity and female virtue were both an antidote to and a mask for colonial aggression." "Stewart's approach - poststructuralist, postcolonial, and intertextual - yields a revisionary rereading of Austen's novels. The model she offers can also be used to reread texts other than Austen's and thus invites a fresh examination of the dominant cultural discourses at the beginning of modernity."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Jane Austen in Context
Jane Austen in Context

Author: Janet M. Todd

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2005-10-20

Total Pages: 516

ISBN-13: 9780521826440

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A lively illustrated collection of short essays on a wide range of aspects of Austen's life, work and times.

Empire And Others
Empire And Others

Author: Professor M Daunton

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-09-10

Total Pages: 653

ISBN-13: 1000144542

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Much has been written about the forging of a British identity in the 17th and 18th centuries, from the multiple kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland. But the process also ran across the Irish sea and was played out in North America and the Caribbean. In the process, the indigenous peoples of North America, the Caribbean, the Cape, Australia and New Zealand were forced to redefine their identities. This text integrates the history of these areas with British and imperial history. With contributions from both sides of the Atlantic, each chapter deals with a different aspect of British encounters with indigenous peoples in Colonial America and includes, for example, sections on "Native Americans and Early Modern Concepts of Race" and "Hunting and the Politics of Masculinity in Cherokee treaty-making, 1763-1775". This book should be of particular interest to postgraduate students of Colonial American history and early modern British history.

Jane Austen
Jane Austen

Author: Robert P. Irvine

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2005-01-28

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 1134380356

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Robert P. Irvine's guide to Jane Austen and her work is essential reading for students of English Literature. It is suitable both for students at introductory level, as extended reading, or for those beginning a detailed study of Austen.

Women and Gift Exchange in Eighteenth-Century Fiction
Women and Gift Exchange in Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Author: Linda Zionkowski

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-05-26

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1317240472

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This book analyzes why the most influential novelists of the long eighteenth century centered their narratives on the theory and practice of gift exchange. Throughout this period, fundamental shifts in economic theories regarding the sources of individual and national wealth along with transformations in the practices of personal and institutional charity profoundly altered cultural understandings of the gift's rationale, purpose, and function. Drawing on materials such as sermons, conduct books, works of political philosophy, and tracts on social reform, Zionkowski challenges the idea that capitalist discourse was the dominant influence on the development of prose fiction. Instead, by shifting attention to the gift system as it was imagined and enacted in the formative years of the novel, the volume offers an innovative understanding of how the economy of obligation shaped writers' portrayals of class and gender identity, property, and community. Through theoretically-informed readings of Richardson's Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison, Burney's Cecilia and The Wanderer, and Austen's Mansfield Park and Emma, the book foregrounds the issues of donation, reciprocity, indebtedness, and gratitude as it investigates the conflicts between the market and moral economies and analyzes women's position at the center of these conflicts. As this study reveals, the exchanges that eighteenth-century fiction prescribed for women confirm the continuing power and importance of gift transactions in the midst of an increasingly commercial culture. The volume will be essential reading for scholars of the eighteenth-century novel, economic literary criticism, women and gender studies, and book history.

Narrating Marriage in Eighteenth-Century England and France
Narrating Marriage in Eighteenth-Century England and France

Author: Chris Roulston

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-22

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 1317090675

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In the eighteenth century, when the definition of marriage was shifting from one based on an hierarchical model to one based on notions of love and mutuality, marital life came under a more intense cultural scrutiny. This led to paradoxical forms of representation of marriage as simultaneously ideal and unlivable. Chris Roulston analyzes how, as representations of married life increased, they challenged the traditional courtship model, offering narratives based on repetition rather than progression. Beginning with English and French marital advice literature, which appropriated novelistic conventions at the same time that it cautioned readers about the dangers of novel reading, she looks at representations of ideal marriages in Pamela II and The New Heloise. Moving on from these ideal domestic spaces, bourgeois marriage is then problematized by the discourse of empire in Sir George Ellison and Letters of Mistress Henley, by troublesome wives in works by Richardson and Samuel de Constant, and by abusive husbands in works by Haywood, Edgeworth, Genlis and Restif de la Bretonne. Finally, the alternative marriage narrative, in which the adultery motif is incorporated into the marriage itself, redefines the function of heteronormativity. In exploring the theoretical issues that arise during this transitional period for married life and the marriage plot, Roulston expands the debates around the evolution of the modern couple.

Jane Austen-Mansfield Park
Jane Austen-Mansfield Park

Author: Sandie Byrne

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2004-10-28

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 0230209211

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The first novel of the author's maturity, Mansfield Park is complex, highly wrought, and experimental. It marks a transitional stage between the first two published novels, Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, and Jane Austen's greatest achievements, Emma and Persuasion. It has been suggested that Mansfield Park is the writer's most autobiographical novel and that, in seeing through the eyes of Fanny Price, deemed the most moralising and judgemental of her heroines, we are seeing through the eyes of Austen herself. Though Fanny Price may be too virtuous for modern readers to take to their hearts, in Mrs Norris Austen creates one of her best, because most plausible, monsters; while in the estate of Mansfield Park itself we find some of the most fully realised descriptions of domestic interiors and exteriors in Austen's fiction. This Guide traces the response to Mansfield Park from the opinions of Jane Austen's contemporaries, through 19th century reviews and 20th century critical analyses, including deconstructionist, feminist, postcolonial and poststructuralist, to diverse 21st century approaches to the novel. Sandie Byrne selects the most useful and insightful of these responses and puts them in context, providing the reader with an essential and approachable introduction to the range of critical debate on this important novel.

The Improvement of the Estate
The Improvement of the Estate

Author: Alistair M. Duckworth

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2020-03-24

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 142143217X

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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.

A Companion to Jane Austen Studies
A Companion to Jane Austen Studies

Author: Robert Thomas Lambdin

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2000-09-30

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 0313032386

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Jane Austen significantly shaped the development of the English novel, and her works continue to be read widely today. Though she is best known for her novels, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion, she also wrote poems, letters, prayers and various pieces of juvenalia. These writings have been attracting the attention of scholars; her major works have already generated a large body of scholarly and critical studies. This reference is a guide to her works and the response to them. Austen's works are fraught with ambiguity. Because she was adept at displaying numerous aspects of an issue, her writings invite multiple interpretations. In light of the ambiguity of her texts, each of her major works is approached from a reader-response perspective, in which an expert contributor illuminates the reader's relationship to her writing. And because so many readers have had such varied responses to her novels, the volume also includes chapters summarizing the critical response to each of her major works. In addition, the book includes separate chapters on her poems, letters, and prayers.

Representing Place in British Literature and Culture, 1660-1830
Representing Place in British Literature and Culture, 1660-1830

Author: Evan Gottlieb

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-08

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 1317065883

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Revising traditional 'rise of the nation-state' narratives, this collection explores the development of and interactions among various forms of local, national, and transnational identities and affiliations during the long eighteenth century. By treating place as historically contingent and socially constructed, this volume examines how Britons experienced and related to a landscape altered by agricultural and industrial modernization, political and religious reform, migration, and the building of nascent overseas empires. In mapping the literary and cultural geographies of the long eighteenth century, the volume poses three challenges to common critical assumptions about the relationships among genre, place, and periodization. First, it questions the novel’s exclusive hold on the imagining of national communities by examining how poetry, drama, travel-writing, and various forms of prose fiction each negotiated the relationships between the local, national, and global in distinct ways. Second, it demonstrates how viewing the literature and culture of the long eighteenth century through a broadly conceived lens of place brings to the foreground authors typically considered 'minor' when seen through more traditional aesthetic, cultural, or theoretical optics. Finally, it contextualizes Romanticism’s long-standing associations with the local and the particular, suggesting that literary localism did not originate in the Romantic era, but instead emerged from previous literary and cultural explorations of space and place. Taken together, the essays work to displace the nation-state as a central category of literary and cultural analysis in eighteenth-century studies.