1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910462638803321

Autore

Galperin William H

Titolo

The historical Austen [[electronic resource] /] / William H. Galperin

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Philadelphia, : University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005, c2003

ISBN

0-8122-0201-5

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (295 p.)

Disciplina

823/.7

Soggetti

Literature and history - Great Britain - History - 19th century

Women and literature - England - History - 19th century

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. [245]-271) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Introduction -- PART I. Historicizing Austen -- 1. History, Silence, and "The Trial of Jane Leigh Perrot" -- 2. The Picturesque, the Real, and the Consumption of Jane Austen -- 3. Why Jane Austen Is Not Frances Burney: Probability, Possibility, and Romantic Counterhegemony -- PART II. Reading the Historical Austen -- 4. Lady Susan and the Failure of Austen's Early Published Novels -- 5. Narrative Incompetence in Northanger Abbey -- 6. Jane Austen's Future Shock -- 7. Nostalgia in Emma -- 8. The Body in Persuasion and Sanditon -- Notes -- Index -- Acknowledgments

Sommario/riassunto

Selected by Choice magazine 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 Austen is 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 Austen sees 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 epistolary Lady Susan and the uncompleted Sanditon, 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.