Jane Austen and Critical Theory is a collection of new essays that addresses the absence of critical theory in Austen studies—an absence that has limited the reach of Austen criticism. The collection brings together innovative scholars who ask new and challenging questions about the efficacy of Austen’s work. This volume confronts mythical understandings of Austen as "Dear Aunt Jane," the early twentieth-century legacy of Austen as a cultural salve, and the persistent habit of reading her works for advice or instruction. The authors pursue a diversity of methods, encourage us to build new kinds of relationships to Austen and her writings, and demonstrate how these relationships might generate new ideas and possibilities—ideas and possibilities that promise to expand the ways in which we deploy Austen. The book specifically reminds us of the vital importance of Austen and her fiction for central concerns of the humanities, including the place of the individual within civil society, the potential for new identities and communities, the urgency to address racial and sexual oppression, and the need to imagine more just futures.
Chapter 4 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Table of Contents:
List of Contributors
Introduction by Michael Kramp
The Cultural Work of Austen's Life and Afterlives
Lady Oracle: Jane Austen as High Priestess of Modern Romance or Secret Icon of Female Independence
Megan A. Woodworth
Jane Austen in Australia and New Zealand
Joanne Wilkes
"This is 1806, for Heaven’s sake!": The Tension between Nostalgia and Feminism in Austen Adaptation and YouTube FanVids
Rebecca White
Identity, Relationality, and Community
Logical Time in Austen's Persuasion: Desire and the Unproductive Anxious Interval
Isabelle Michalski and David Sigler
Pride and Prejudice and the Comedy of the Universal
Daniela Garofalo
Autonomy Will Set You Free, Or Will It?: Autonomy, Precarity and Survival
Enit Karafili Steiner
The Shrewdness of Sophia Croft in Persuasion
Natasha Duquette
The Known and the Possible in Austen
Austen’s Theory of Change
Kate Singer
Jane Austen’s Angry Inch: The Nonbinary Son-to-Come
Chris Washington
Pleasure and Danger: Theorizing Adolescence in and Through Austen
Shawn Lisa Maurer
The Vitality of Austen
The Austenian Mise-en-Scène
Christopher C. Nagle
Wickham Then and Now: From Historical Masculinity to Toxic Masculinity
Kit Kincade
Jane Austen, Feminist Legal Philosopher
Sarah Ailwood
Index
About the Author :
Michael Kramp is Professor of English at Lehigh University, USA. He is the author of Disciplining Love: Austen and the Modern Man (2007) and editor of Jane Austen and Masculinity (2017).
