Jane Austen and the Enlightenment

by Peter Knox-Shaw

Overview

It is now widely understood that Jane Austen's writing and thought were derived directly from her late eighteenth-century childhood, but astonishingly, this is the first study of the influence of the Enlightenment on Jane Austen. Drawing out the Enlightenment principles and ideas which lie behind much of Austen's writing, Peter Knox-Shaw presents a new perspective on the study of Austen's novels.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521759977
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	06/04/2009
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Peter Knox-Shaw is a Research Associate at the University of Cape Town.

Table of Contents

Part I. The Eighteenth-Century Legacy: 1. Auspices; 2. Pride and Prejudice, a politics of the picturesque; 3. Northanger Abbey and the liberal historians; 4. Sense and Sensibility and the philosophers; Part II. Engaging with the New Age: 5. Diffraction; 6. Mansfield Park: charting the religious revival; 7. Emma, and the flaws of sovereignty; 8. Persuasion: light on an old genre; 9. Sanditon and speculation; Bibliography.

Editorial Reviews

"...This well-researched book will be a boon. Essential."
CHOICE July 2005

"...a model of thoughtful engagement...imparts a wonderful freshness to constellations that seemed terribly familiar."
Studies in English Literature

"an intelligent and inspiring critique that asks us to return to Austen, her contemporaries and her predecessors with an increased sensitivity to the connections between them, and a renewed pleasure in the complexity of the novels themselves."
Michael Caines, Times Literary Supplement

"Jane Austen and the Enlightenment is a triumph: one of the most exciting publications to appear on the author in recent years, and one that genuinely opens new horizons. It is essential reading for scholars of Austen’s works and for those interested in the relationship of literature and philosophy. Accessibly and felicitously written, it also has much to offer general readers of Austen."
E. J. Clery, Modern Philology

"constantly illuminating and abundantly well written. His exploration of the routine topics – including such hoary old chestnuts as the juvenilia, the picturesque, the Steventon theatricals, and Evangellicalism – is original, informative and effectively harnessed to his overall argument. And what emerges from all this is a more interesting Jane Austen – an author better read, better educated and better informed than we have been given reason to suppose."
Brian Southam, Jane Austen Society Newsletter

"Peter Knox-Shaw greatly contributes to a new reading of the novels … [his] demonstration is very convincing ... he gives historical justification to her progressivism while other critics only assert it."
Chloé Beccaria, Cercles

"it is with this peculiar and engaging dynamic that Peter Knox-Shaw undertakes the project of recasting Jane Austen as a conscientious and receptive woman of her time." Monica Shores, APA Newsletter

"a careful demonstration of the complexities of political and intellectual currents in Austen’s tumultuous era."
Adela Pinch, Romanticism

"offers new insights into the eighteenth century and its Enlightenment critique at a time when secular sanity is much in demand."
Rodney Farnsworth, European Romantic Review

"supremely astute and discriminating…"
Freya Johnston, Year’s Work in English Studies

"bursting with new insights…"
Jocelyn Harris, Nineteenth-Century Literature

"densely argued, readable, and exceptionally exciting … his success in this fine study is a tribute to his cautiously conservative scholarly approach." Daniel Traister, JASNA News

From the Publisher