"The best (and the best written) book about Austen that has appeared in the last three decades." Nina Auerbach, "Journal of English and Germanic Philology"
"By looking at the ways in which Austen domesticates the gothic in "Northanger Abbey," examines the conventions of male inheritance and its negative impact on attempts to define the family as a site of care and generosity in "Sense and Sensibility," makes claims for the desirability of 'personal happiness as a liberating moral category' in "Pride and Prejudice," validates the rights of female authority in "Emma," and stresses the...

In the wake of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke argued that civil order depended upon nurturing the sensibility of men upon the masculine cultivation of traditionally feminine qualities such as sentiment, tenderness, veneration, awe, gratitude, and even prejudice. Writers as diverse as Sterne, Goldsmith, Burke, and Rousseau were politically motivated to represent authority figures as men of feeling, but denied women comparable authority by representing their feelings as inferior, pathological, or criminal. Focusing on Mary Wollstonecraft, Ann Radcliffe, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen,...

"Contexts" includes contemporary materials on the slave trade, religion, conduct literature for women, and landscape design that illuminate this dark and often disturbing novel. Elizabeth Inchbald's adaptation ofLovers' Vows (the play staged by the characters in Mansfield Park) is included, as are writings by Humphry Repton, Thomas Gisborne, Hannah More, and Mary Wollstonecraft, among others. "Criticism" presents a superb selection of critical writing about the novel The critics include Jan Fergus, Lionel Trilling, Alistair Duckworth, Nina Auerebach, Claudia L. Johnson,...

Once viewed solely in relation to the history of feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft is now recognized as a writer of formidable talent across a range of genres, including journalism, letters and travel writing, and is increasingly understood as an heir to eighteenth-century literary and political traditions as well as a forebear of romanticism. This Companion is the first collected volume to address all aspects of Wollstonecraft's momentous and tragically brief career. The diverse and searching essays specially commissioned for this volume do justice to Wollstonecraft's pivotal importance in her...

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
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Jane Austen completed only six novels, but enduring passion for the author and her works has driven fans to read these books repeatedly, in book clubs or solo, while also inspiring countless film adaptations, sequels, and even spoofs involving zombies and sea monsters. Austen's lasting appeal to both popular and elite audiences has lifted her to legendary status. In Jane Austen's Cults and Cultures, Claudia L. Johnson shows how Jane Austen became "Jane Austen," a figure intensely--sometimes even wildly--venerated, and often for markedly different reasons.

Johnson begins by...