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.
Author(s): Michael Kramp
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2021
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction
PART I: The Cultural Work of Austen’s Life and Afterlives
1. Lady Oracle: Jane Austen as High Priestess of Modern Romance or Secret Icon of Female Independence
2. Jane Austen in Australia and New Zealand
3. “This is 1806, for Heaven’s sake!”: The Tension between Nostalgia and Feminism in Austen Adaptation and YouTube FanVids
PART II: Identity, Relationality, and Community
4. Logical Time in Austen’s Persuasion: Desire and the Unproductive Anxious Interval
5. Pride and Prejudice and the Comedy of the Universal
6. Autonomy Will Set You Free, or Will It?: Autonomy, Precarity, and Survival
7. The Shrewdness of Sophia Croft in Persuasion
PART III: The Known and the Possible in Austen
8. Austen’s Theory of Change
9. Jane Austen’s Angry Inch: The Nonbinary Son-to-Come
10. Pleasure and Danger: Theorizing Adolescence in and through Austen
PART IV: The Vitality of Austen
11. The Austenian Mise-en-Scène
12. Wickham Then and Now: From Historical Masculinity to Toxic Masculinity
13. Jane Austen, Feminist Legal Philosopher
Index
