Matters of Fact in Jane Austen: History, Location, and Celebrity - Hardcover

Barchas, Janine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1421406403 ISBN 13: 9781421406404

Verlag: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012

Über diesen Titel

Críticas:

An impeccably researched new book.

(Examiner.com)

Matters of Fact in Jane Austen is unlike any previous work of Austen criticism, both in its attention to minute historical detail and in its pioneering claims... [It] is meticulously researched, beautifully written, highly original, and unquestionably timely. It ought to stimulate not just rousing arguments but provoke, too, further historically attuned Austen scholarship.

(Devoney Looser Los Angeles Review of Books)

This is a book whose charm and clarity easily overcome any initial resistance one might have to its central claim that Austen’s work actively partakes in what historians now call 'celebrity culture'... One of Barchas’s most surprising—and ultimately convincing—claims is that Austen, like James Joyce after her, 'not only names her fictional characters with uncanny historical precision but maps them with equal care through historical settings'. She illustrates this with careful attention to Austen’s own historical reading and letters, prints of contemporary maps, portraits and country houses.

(Jonathan Sachs Times Literary Supplement)

This is easily one of the most important books on Austen published in recent years, a must read. Thanks to fantastic volumes like this one... Austen's books are finally being read and reassessed in the context of their times and are no longer given the backhanded compliment of being called 'timeless'... Essential. (Named by Choice in its list of Outstanding Academic Titles, 2013)

(Choice)

A provocative, suggestive, and original book which makes a genuine contribution to scholarship on Jane Austen... It is an excellent example of a truly interdisciplinary approach to literary criticism.

(Katie Halsey Review of English Studies)

This is a huge achievement.

(Sarah Raff Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies)

In a lively and formidably informed study, Janine Barchas buries the lingering myth of Jane Austen as 'a cloistered rectory daughter,' and convincingly reconstructs her as 'a local and national historian'—and moreover a confirmed name-dropper who subtly manipulates the celebrity culture of her day.

(Juliet McMaster, Distinguished University Professor Emeritus, University of Alberta)

Renovating the historicist pedantry of readers like Vladimir Nabokov, who plotted geographical locales and estimated room dimensions in the margins of his teaching copy of Mansfield Park, Janine Barchas remaps the coordinates of Austen’s fictive world as nodal points in a network of real names of glamorous places and people—Wentworth, Wodehouse, D’Arcy, and Fitzwilliam among them. Matters of Fact in Jane Austen is too modest a title for this prescient book, in which facts matter as markers of Austen’s creative method, authorizing the vividness of her charismatically alluring characters and plots.

(Joseph Roach, Sterling Professor of Theater and English, Yale University, and author of It)

The author seeks to pull Austen away from her timelessness... Jane is not just a keen observer of those 3 or 4 families but of all the aristocracy famous or scandalous enough to make the papers... In a world where feminine accomplishments and interests are still denigrated and marginalized, it’s important to pull Jane out of the parlor.

(Plot Driven)

Moving away from domesticity and beyond broad social history, Matters of Fact in Jane Austen proceeds as a series of detailed case studies that, taken together, make a strong argument for Austen as a popular culture aficionado and for scholars’ attachment to her vaunted 'timelessness' as a disservice to her powers of observation and allusion.

(Laura E. Thomason, Middle Georgia State College ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts)

Reseña del editor:

In Matters of Fact in Jane Austen: History, Location, and Celebrity, Janine Barchas makes the bold assertion that Jane Austen’s novels allude to actual high-profile politicians and contemporary celebrities as well as to famous historical figures and landed estates. Barchas is the first scholar to conduct extensive research into the names and locations in Austen’s fiction by taking full advantage of the explosion of archival materials now available online.

According to Barchas, Austen plays confidently with the tension between truth and invention that characterizes the realist novel. Of course, the argument that Austen deployed famous names presupposes an active celebrity culture during the Regency, a phenomenon recently accepted by scholars. The names Austen plucks from history for her protagonists (Dashwood, Wentworth, Woodhouse, Tilney, Fitzwilliam, and many more) were immensely famous in her day. She seems to bank upon this familiarity for interpretive effect, often upending associations with comic intent.

Barchas re-situates Austen’s work closer to the historical novels of her contemporary Sir Walter Scott and away from the domestic and biographical perspectives that until recently have dominated Austen studies. This forward-thinking and revealing investigation offers scholars and ardent fans of Jane Austen a wealth of historical facts, while shedding an interpretive light on a new aspect of the beloved writer's work.

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1421406403
• ISBN 13: 9781421406404
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336