Jane Austen's Textual Lives: From Aeschylus to Bollywood

Through three intertwined histories Jane Austen's Textual Lives. offers a new way of approaching and reading a very familiar author. One is a history of the transmission and transformation of Jane Austen through manuscripts, critical editions, biographies, and adaptations; a second provides a conspectus of the development of English Studies as a discipline in which the original and primary place of textual criticism is recovered; and a third reviews the role of Oxford University Press in shaping a canon of English texts in the twentieth century. Jane Austen can be discovered in all three. Since her rise to celebrity status at the end of the nineteenth century, Jane Austen has occupied a position within English-speaking culture that is both popular and canonical, accessible and complexly inaccessible, fixed and certain yet wonderfully amenable to shifts of sensibility and cultural assumptions. The implied contradiction was represented in the early twentieth century by, on the one hand, the Austen family's continued management, censorship, and sentimental marketing of the sweet lady novelist of the Hampshire countryside; and on the other, by R. W.Chapman's 1923 Clarendon Press edition of the Novels of Jane Austen, which subjected her texts to the kind of scholarly probing reserved till then for classical Greek and Roman authors obscured by centuries of attrition. It was to be almost fifty years before the Clarendon Press considered it necessary to recalibrate the reputation of another popular English novelist in this way. Beginning with specific encounters with three kinds of textual work and the problems, clues, or challenges to interpretation they continue to present, Kathryn Sutherland goes on to consider the absence of a satisfactory critical theory of biography that can help us address the partial life, and ends with a discussion of the screen adaptations through which the texts continue to live on. Throughout, Jane Austen's textual identities provide a means to explore the wider issue of what text is and to argue the importance of understanding textual space as itself a powerful agent established only by recourse to further interpretations and fictions.

Table of Contents:
ONE: 'THE MAKING OF ENGLAND'S JANE'; i 'Everybody's dear Jane'; ii Janeites in the trenches; iii R. W. Chapman restores civilization; iv Territorial acts; TWO: PERSONAL OBSCURITY AND THE BIOGRAPHER'S BAGGAGE; i Ground rules?; ii Cassandra's legacies, or the family management of Jane Austen's life; iii Two texts; iv Secrets and lies, or managing the family; v Coda: portraits; THREE: MANUSCRIPTS AND THE ACTS OF WRITING; i Dead ends and false starts; ii The Watsons: Jane Austen's other Bath novel; iii Persuasion: from manuscript to print; iv Sanditon; FOUR: TEXTUAL IDENTITIES: 1; i 'Print settles it'; ii Professional writer: Jane Austen's other identity; iii 'The Steventon Edition'; iv Continuations: Anna Lefroy's Sanditon and Catherine Hubback's The Younger Sister; FIVE: SPEAKING COMMAS; i 'A total inattention to stops, and a very frequent ignorance of grammar'; ii 'To an editor nothing is a trifle by which his author is obscured'; iii 'For this book is the talking voice that runs on'; SIX: TEXTUAL IDENTITIES: 2; i 'The grammar of literary investigation': or, a brief history of textual criticism in the twentieth century; ii Film as textual future

About the Author :
Kathryn Sutherland is Professor of Bibliography and Textual Criticism at the University of Oxford. She was previously Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Nottingham.

Review :
I for one cannot imagine doing without this book in any further work I might do on Jane Austen - it proposes a revolution in examining these beloved familiar works, and in doing so makes them gloriously new and unfamiliar again. Penny Gay, Sensibilities Professor Sutherland's achievement is not only in commanding such an extensive and varied field but doing so in such fascinating detail Jane Austen Society Newsletter The most important scholarly work on Austen written to date...a model of reception study...admirable interpretive dexterity...a wholly new and captivating survey of adaptations...This book will repay any scholar who reads it both for what it says about Jane Austen's work and about our own. Review of English Studies, June 2006 Powerful and ground breaking... TLS, February 2006 Kathryn Sutherland's Jane Austen's Textual Lives [is] a learned, wide-ranging and subtle study of Austen's texts, editors, biographers and reception history. TLS, February 2006