1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910784304903321

Autore

Knox-Shaw Peter <1944->

Titolo

Jane Austen and the Enlightenment / / Peter Knox-Shaw [[electronic resource]]

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Cambridge : , : Cambridge University Press, , 2004

ISBN

1-107-16369-2

1-280-70329-6

0-511-23146-6

0-511-23069-9

0-511-22907-0

0-511-31668-2

0-511-48435-6

0-511-22991-7

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (xi, 275 pages) : digital, PDF file(s)

Disciplina

823/.7

Soggetti

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

Enlightenment - Great Britain

Skepticism in literature

Great Britain Intellectual life 18th century

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. 255-267) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Auspices -- Pride and prejudice : a politics of the picturesque -- Northanger Abbey and the liberal historians -- Sense and sensibility and the philosophers -- Diffraction -- Mansfield Park : charting the religious revival -- Emma, and the flaws of sovereignty -- Persuasion : light on an old genre -- Sanditon and speculation.

Sommario/riassunto

Jane Austen was received by her contemporaries as a new voice, but her late twentieth-century reputation as a nostalgic reactionary still lingers on. In this radical revision of her engagement with the culture and politics of her age, Peter Knox-Shaw argues that Austen was a writer steeped in the Enlightenment, and that her allegiance to a sceptical tradition within it, shaped by figures such as Adam Smith and David Hume, lasted throughout her career. Knox-Shaw draws on archival and



other neglected sources to reconstruct the intellectual atmosphere of the Steventon Rectory where Austen wrote her juvenilia, and follows the course of her work through the 1790s and onwards, showing how minutely responsive it was to the many shifting movements of those turbulent years. Jane Austen and the Enlightenment is an important contribution to the study both of Jane Austen and of intellectual history at the turn of the nineteenth century.