Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon

by Clara Tuite

Overview

This volume is the first to address Jane Austen's writings within the traditions of Romanticism. Tuite's study presents a series of historically contextualized readings of Austen's juvenilia (Catharine, or The Bower and The History of England), Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park and Austen's posthumously published novel, Sanditon, to examine ways in which Romantic-period definitions of nation, culture and literature continue to function in contemporary readings of Austen and her period.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521054393
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	01/21/2008
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Romanticism , #49
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.71(d)

About the Author

Clara Tuite is a Lecturer in English at the University of Melbourne. She is an associate editor of The Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture 1776-1832 (1999). She has published articles on Gothic literature in Eighteenth-Century Life and Romanticism on the Net.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; Note on texts used; Introduction. The 'fall into a quotation': tracking the canonical, Romantic and post-Romantic Austen; 1. Aunt Jane's 'early workings' and 'betweenities': closet dramas of literary apprenticeship; 2. Sensibility, free indirect style and the Romantic technology of discretion; 3. Breeding heritage culture: Mansfield Park, Reflections on the Revolution in France and the glorious revolutions of the country house; 4. Austen's Romantic fragment: Sanditon and the sexual politics of land speculation; Epilogue; Notes; Select bibliography; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"A theoretically sophisticated...meditation on Austen's novels." Studies in English Literature

"The most exhilirating aspects...lie in Tuite's conceptualization of Austen's oeuvre and in her brilliantly inventive, distinctive ways of opening up the texts to new readings, new echoes and new contexts." European Romantic Review

"In chapters on Austen's juvenilia ... Tuite presents a very familiar figure: Jane Austen the 'conservative feminist' and defender of 'Burkean patriliny' among the landed gentry, albeit a gentry open to new female energy from its lower regions... The result is a book that advanced specialists may find suggestive...." Choice

From the Publisher