D.W. Harding was a rarity amongst literary critics since his academic career was passed as Professor of Psychology. Yet this professional occupation never obtruded. As Professor Knights writes in his Foreword, as a critic 'he was one of the most sanely subtle or subtly sane) of his generation'. His title essay, 'Regulated Hatred', altered the course of Austen criticism, and this selection from the best of his writing about his favourite author (some of it previously unpublished) will be an important landmark in Austen criticism.
D.W. Harding was a rarity amongst literary critics since his academic career was passed as Professor of Psychology. Yet this professional occupation never obtruded. As Professor Knights writes in his Foreword, as a critic 'he was one of the most sanely subtle or subtly sane) of his generation'. His title essay, 'Regulated Hatred', altered the course of Austen criticism, and this selection from the best of his writing about his favourite author (some of it previously unpublished) will be an important landmark in Austen criticism.
Recreating Jane Austen is a book for readers who know and love Austen s work. Stimulated by the recent crop of film and television versions of Austen s novels, John Wiltshire examines how they have been transposed and recreated in another age and medium. Wiltshire illuminates the process of recreation through the work of the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, and offers Jane Austen s own relation to Shakespeare as a suggestive parallel. Exploring the romantic impulse in Austenian biography, Jane Austen as a commodity, and offering a re-interpretation of Pride and Prejudice, this book approaches the central question of the role Jane Austen plays in the contemporary cultural imagination.
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.
Jane Austen has been one of the world's most popular writers for 200 years and is best known for her works Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Sense and Sensibility.
Reflecting the dynamic and expansive nature of Austen studies, A Companion to Jane Austen provides 42 essays from a distinguished team of literary scholars that examine the full breadth of the English novelist's works and career. Provides the most comprehensive and up-to-date array of Austen scholarship Functions both as a scholarly reference and as a survey of the most innovative speculative developments in the field of Austen studies Engages at length with changing contexts and cultures of reception from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries
Johnson begins by exploring the most important monuments and portraits of Austen, considering how these artifacts point to an author who is invisible and yet whose image is inseparable from the characters and fictional worlds she created. She then passes through the four critical phases of Austen's reception.
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.
