|
|
|
ENGLISH 327: JANE AUSTEN IN CONTEXT
Notes for Lecture 1: Introduction
I. Jane Mania
II. Readerships: Jane Austen and the claims of high as well as popular culture: the elect, the common reader, and the hoi polloi; "Janeites" and elegists.
III. Biography: Born in 1775 Steventon; moves to Bath in 1801; to Southampton in 1805, to Chawton in 1809; dies 1817 in Winchester at 42, of Addison's disease.
A. "Formal" Education: "tutoring" at Oxford and Southampton 1792; boarding school at Reading in 1793 or 1794; private education at home.
B. Youthful Literary Activity: "juvenile" writing from late 1780s onward. Possible contributions to brothers' Oxford periodical The Loiterer in 1789-90. Love and Freindship [sic] written in 1790; Lady Susan in 1794; Elinor and Marianne (later Sense and Sensibility) drafted in 1795/1797, now lost; First Impressions (later Pride and Prejudice) drafted 1796/97, now lost; Susan (later Catherine, later Northanger Abbey) written and sold to Crosby & Co. for publication, never appeared). The Watsons (fragment) in 1803-4.
C. Later Literary Activity: Sense and Sensibility (1811); Pride and Prejudice (1813); Mansfield Park (1814); Emma (1815); Persuasion and Northanger Abbey published together posthumously in 1817. Sanditon unfinished.
IV. Portraits (See Web Site)
V. Achievement as a Novelist
A. The invention of the modern novel
B. Bits of Ivory: Austen's stylistic mastery
C. Austen and ideology: the novel of manners
D. Creating a "world" of "real" characters: Austen and Shakespeare (I)
E. The glory of Englishness: Austen, Shakespeare, and Nostalgia (II)
F. The dignity of the ordinary
VI. The Case for Detractors
A. Mark Twain: Austen as the champion of middle class propriety
B. Bronte, Garrod, Lawrence: the spinster who fails heterosexual passion
C. R.W. Emerson, Cardinal Newman: Jane Austen as Banal
VII. Austen and the Politics of Literary Judgment
|
http://www.princeton.edu/~cjohnson/pucourse/eng327/lecture.shtml |