This essay considers the modern cultural forces behind Jane Austen’s fame by re-examining the commonplace hierarchical binaries that exist within the long history of Jane Austen’s reception – such as the tensions between scholarship and fandom, or elite and popular culture. It replaces the vertical axis upon which we commonly hang these binaries with a horizontal one, and reframes these competing forces as both centrifugal and centripetal in trajectory: centrifugal in one sense, owing to the passing of time, globalisation, the proliferation of genre and media, generating a myriad of afterlives; centripetal in another sense, as a counteracting desire to retain or recover the original, mortal figure of Austen the author (whether achievable or not). This reconceptualisation helps to reveal the ways in which this tension – so often negatively portrayed as a source of division and rancour in Austen scholarship and fandom – is actually the driving energy sustaining Austen’s seemingly endless fame. It does so by briefly considering Austen’s apotheosis in relation to Romantic notions of fame; the heteroglossic nature of Austen’s novels and their central role in generating diversifying cultural forces; and, how these contrasting cultural forces operate to sustain her modern iconic status. Centripetal and centrifugal forces are revealed to operate at key stages of Austen’s reception, but not always in balance. This suggestive discussion, then, is an examination of how this balance came to be.
{"title":"Jane Austen, Mortal Immortal (and Other Contrarieties of Fame)","authors":"E. Parisot","doi":"10.3366/rom.2023.0592","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2023.0592","url":null,"abstract":"This essay considers the modern cultural forces behind Jane Austen’s fame by re-examining the commonplace hierarchical binaries that exist within the long history of Jane Austen’s reception – such as the tensions between scholarship and fandom, or elite and popular culture. It replaces the vertical axis upon which we commonly hang these binaries with a horizontal one, and reframes these competing forces as both centrifugal and centripetal in trajectory: centrifugal in one sense, owing to the passing of time, globalisation, the proliferation of genre and media, generating a myriad of afterlives; centripetal in another sense, as a counteracting desire to retain or recover the original, mortal figure of Austen the author (whether achievable or not). This reconceptualisation helps to reveal the ways in which this tension – so often negatively portrayed as a source of division and rancour in Austen scholarship and fandom – is actually the driving energy sustaining Austen’s seemingly endless fame. It does so by briefly considering Austen’s apotheosis in relation to Romantic notions of fame; the heteroglossic nature of Austen’s novels and their central role in generating diversifying cultural forces; and, how these contrasting cultural forces operate to sustain her modern iconic status. Centripetal and centrifugal forces are revealed to operate at key stages of Austen’s reception, but not always in balance. This suggestive discussion, then, is an examination of how this balance came to be.","PeriodicalId":42939,"journal":{"name":"Romanticism","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42418559","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Jennifer L. Airey, Religion Around Mary Shelley","authors":"Anna Mercer","doi":"10.3366/rom.2023.0600","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2023.0600","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42939,"journal":{"name":"Romanticism","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49488421","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay investigates Jane Austen’s early posthumous political reputation through several pieces of writing published in the early 1830s. It considers her brother Henry Austen’s biographical visions of her in terms of gender and authorship, in his ‘Memoir of Miss Austen’ (1833), which is an extended version of his earlier ‘Biographical Notice of the Author’, prefixed to Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (1818). The essay compares Henry’s characterisations of his sister in light of the political rhetoric of the early 1830s to conclude that Henry’s writing may have been joining debates over voting rights and women’s suffrage that took place shortly before he revised his memoir of his sister.
{"title":"Political Austen, Right and Left","authors":"D. Looser","doi":"10.3366/rom.2023.0598","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2023.0598","url":null,"abstract":"This essay investigates Jane Austen’s early posthumous political reputation through several pieces of writing published in the early 1830s. It considers her brother Henry Austen’s biographical visions of her in terms of gender and authorship, in his ‘Memoir of Miss Austen’ (1833), which is an extended version of his earlier ‘Biographical Notice of the Author’, prefixed to Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (1818). The essay compares Henry’s characterisations of his sister in light of the political rhetoric of the early 1830s to conclude that Henry’s writing may have been joining debates over voting rights and women’s suffrage that took place shortly before he revised his memoir of his sister.","PeriodicalId":42939,"journal":{"name":"Romanticism","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46796038","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Death was a common occurrence in Jane Austen’s life. Her father died in 1805; her friend Mrs Lefroy was killed in an accident in 1804; her sister’s fiancé died in 1797. In the songs she sang and played, death was a recurrent theme, with sentimental and melodramatic lyrics vowing fidelity unto death, or mourning the passing of a lover or a sister. However, death usually keeps to the background of the emotional landscape of her novels. No character we ‘know’ well dies in the course of any of the novels, although some – Marianne Dashwood, Tom Bertram, Louisa Musgrove – may be in mortal danger. Deaths ‘offstage’ can liberate characters, like Eleanor Tilney and Frank Churchill. Other deaths, typically of parents before a novel’s action begins, put the main characters in perilous financial situations, or deprive them of essential moral and emotional support at an early age. The few examples where a child or young person has died – Fanny Price’s sister, Captain Benwick’s fiancée, Dick Musgrove – provide perceptive portrayals of characters grieving in their idiosyncratic ways. In this essay I aim to explore whether particular deaths are ever much more than plot devices in Austen’s novels. To what extent does the form of comedy constrain her from dealing with darker themes? Does her resistance to melodrama and sentimentality mean that she avoids deaths or intimations of mortality in the six completed works, or can grief and the fear of death undercut the gaiety of even the most light-hearted of her novels, and pervade the shadowy depths of the more serious works?
{"title":"‘The Great Mrs Churchill was No More’: Death in Jane Austen’s Novels","authors":"Gillian Dooley","doi":"10.3366/rom.2023.0595","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2023.0595","url":null,"abstract":"Death was a common occurrence in Jane Austen’s life. Her father died in 1805; her friend Mrs Lefroy was killed in an accident in 1804; her sister’s fiancé died in 1797. In the songs she sang and played, death was a recurrent theme, with sentimental and melodramatic lyrics vowing fidelity unto death, or mourning the passing of a lover or a sister. However, death usually keeps to the background of the emotional landscape of her novels. No character we ‘know’ well dies in the course of any of the novels, although some – Marianne Dashwood, Tom Bertram, Louisa Musgrove – may be in mortal danger. Deaths ‘offstage’ can liberate characters, like Eleanor Tilney and Frank Churchill. Other deaths, typically of parents before a novel’s action begins, put the main characters in perilous financial situations, or deprive them of essential moral and emotional support at an early age. The few examples where a child or young person has died – Fanny Price’s sister, Captain Benwick’s fiancée, Dick Musgrove – provide perceptive portrayals of characters grieving in their idiosyncratic ways. In this essay I aim to explore whether particular deaths are ever much more than plot devices in Austen’s novels. To what extent does the form of comedy constrain her from dealing with darker themes? Does her resistance to melodrama and sentimentality mean that she avoids deaths or intimations of mortality in the six completed works, or can grief and the fear of death undercut the gaiety of even the most light-hearted of her novels, and pervade the shadowy depths of the more serious works?","PeriodicalId":42939,"journal":{"name":"Romanticism","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49077811","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The news that her family were to leave Steventon to live in Bath has often been thought a key moment in Jane Austen's life. She is said to have fainted in distress. This essay does not mine Austen's novels for clues to the author’s personal history, or suggest that the loss of a beloved home is directly reproduced in any of her novels, though this has been suggested, but argues instead that Austen’s fictions do show the impress of this traumatic experience in a more elusive and in-depth mode. In all of her novels, the motif of the loss of home plays a role, though quite differently in each. I draw on the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘family resemblance’ to provide a conceptual framework, and to illuminate the affinities between the novels and the author's life.
{"title":"Family Resemblance: Displacement and Loss in Jane Austen’s Novels","authors":"J. Wiltshire","doi":"10.3366/rom.2023.0594","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2023.0594","url":null,"abstract":"The news that her family were to leave Steventon to live in Bath has often been thought a key moment in Jane Austen's life. She is said to have fainted in distress. This essay does not mine Austen's novels for clues to the author’s personal history, or suggest that the loss of a beloved home is directly reproduced in any of her novels, though this has been suggested, but argues instead that Austen’s fictions do show the impress of this traumatic experience in a more elusive and in-depth mode. In all of her novels, the motif of the loss of home plays a role, though quite differently in each. I draw on the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘family resemblance’ to provide a conceptual framework, and to illuminate the affinities between the novels and the author's life.","PeriodicalId":42939,"journal":{"name":"Romanticism","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41671845","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jane Austen, Clifford Siskin once proposed, was for a long time the sole exception to the ‘Great Forgetting’: the only female author from a period when women in fact dominated the literary marketplace whom English-language readers still remembered a century later. The better to recover Austen’s own thinking about the memorability and durability of female achievement, this article puts Austen’s third novel, Mansfield Park (1814) into conversation with the Swiss-French novelist Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, or Italy (1807). It traces Austen’s response to Stael’s influential storyline of female genius, as well as the allusions to the English tragedienne Sarah Siddons that form another link between the two novels. In Staël’s story of a brilliant but doomed improvisatrice, the glamour of the female genius is associated, poignantly, with a vocality that eludes archiving in written marks or signs. Yet the premise that what the woman of genius says, goes, and that her words are fated to vanish into thin air, also becomes within Corinne the foundation for Stael’s investigation of cultural transmission and of the limitations of written forms as archives of transient aural experiences. With its commentaries on performance, memory, and ephemerality, Mansfield Park continues this project of media theory.
{"title":"The Unwritten History of the Woman of Genius (Austen, Staël, Siddons): What She Says, Goes","authors":"D. Lynch","doi":"10.3366/rom.2023.0597","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2023.0597","url":null,"abstract":"Jane Austen, Clifford Siskin once proposed, was for a long time the sole exception to the ‘Great Forgetting’: the only female author from a period when women in fact dominated the literary marketplace whom English-language readers still remembered a century later. The better to recover Austen’s own thinking about the memorability and durability of female achievement, this article puts Austen’s third novel, Mansfield Park (1814) into conversation with the Swiss-French novelist Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, or Italy (1807). It traces Austen’s response to Stael’s influential storyline of female genius, as well as the allusions to the English tragedienne Sarah Siddons that form another link between the two novels. In Staël’s story of a brilliant but doomed improvisatrice, the glamour of the female genius is associated, poignantly, with a vocality that eludes archiving in written marks or signs. Yet the premise that what the woman of genius says, goes, and that her words are fated to vanish into thin air, also becomes within Corinne the foundation for Stael’s investigation of cultural transmission and of the limitations of written forms as archives of transient aural experiences. With its commentaries on performance, memory, and ephemerality, Mansfield Park continues this project of media theory.","PeriodicalId":42939,"journal":{"name":"Romanticism","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43301866","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
My essay works backward from today’s incontrovertibly immortal Austen to consider a precarious Austen – an Austen on the verge of sinking ‘too low’, as her nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, labelled the heroine of Austen’s novel fragment, The Watsons. This Austen is not the spinster redux of today’s global domination, but the Austen of 1817, an unmarried middle-aged woman living off the charity of her brothers at Chawton Cottage. ‘At the height of her powers’ (according to Virginia Woolf), she was also fragile, fugitive, shabby genteel. The category of precarity, I argue, helps us to trace Austen’s unique calibrations of social rank, genre, tone and stylistics, and to consider the economic, social, emotional and stylistic forms that shape the prehistory of Austenian fame.
{"title":"Precarious Austen: A Shabby Genteel Story","authors":"C. Tuite","doi":"10.3366/rom.2023.0593","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2023.0593","url":null,"abstract":"My essay works backward from today’s incontrovertibly immortal Austen to consider a precarious Austen – an Austen on the verge of sinking ‘too low’, as her nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, labelled the heroine of Austen’s novel fragment, The Watsons. This Austen is not the spinster redux of today’s global domination, but the Austen of 1817, an unmarried middle-aged woman living off the charity of her brothers at Chawton Cottage. ‘At the height of her powers’ (according to Virginia Woolf), she was also fragile, fugitive, shabby genteel. The category of precarity, I argue, helps us to trace Austen’s unique calibrations of social rank, genre, tone and stylistics, and to consider the economic, social, emotional and stylistic forms that shape the prehistory of Austenian fame.","PeriodicalId":42939,"journal":{"name":"Romanticism","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47317606","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Chris Washington and Anne C. McCarthy, Romanticism and Speculative Realism","authors":"P. Shaw","doi":"10.3366/rom.2023.0605","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2023.0605","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42939,"journal":{"name":"Romanticism","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46216355","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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