The light of Austen scholarship was beginning to shine through several important early works. These works helped Austen become well accepted in the . The first was Oxford Shakespearean scholar Andrew Cecil Bradley's 1911 essay. This essay was "generally (largely) regarded (seen) as the starting-point for the serious academic approach to Jane Austen". Bradley pointed out Austen's ties to eighteenth-century critic and writer Samuel Johnson. He argued that she was a moralist as well as a humorist. According to Southam, this argument was "totally (completely) original". Bradley separated Austen's works into "early" and "late" novels. Scholars still separate Austen's works as Bradley did today. The second original early-twentieth-century critic of Austen was R. W. Chapman. His edition of Austen's works was the first scholarly edition of the works of any English novelist. The Chapman edition has been the basis for all editions of Austen's works after that.
After Bradley and Chapman, Austen scholarship grew very quickly in the 1920s. British writer E. M. Forster pointed out Austen's works for his idea of the "round" character. It was with the 1939 publication of Mary Lascelles' "Jane Austen and Her Art"—"the first full-scale historical and scholarly study" of Austen—that the academic study of her works matured. Lascelles included a short essay about her, a study of the books Austen read and their influence on her writing, and a study of Austen's style and "narrative art". Lascelles felt that critics before her had all worked in a way "so small that the reader does not see how they have reached their conclusions until he has patiently found his own way to them". She wished to study all of Austen's works, style, and techniques together. Critics after Lascelles agreed that she studied them well. Lascelles was interested in Austen's connection to Samuel Johnson and her desire to discuss morality through fiction. In this she was much like Bradley before her. But around this time, some fans of Austen began to worry that her works were being enjoyed by only a few people. They were fearful that Austen was being criticized only by academics. This was an argument that continued to the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Mid-century revisionist views started to become popular, and scholars began studying Austen more sceptically. D. W. Harding, adding to Farrer, wrote an essay called "Regulated Hatred: An Aspect of the Work of Jane Austen". He argued that Austen did not support society's customs, and that her irony was not funny but bitter. He also claimed that Austen wanted to show the faults of the society she wrote about. Through her use of irony, Austen tried to protect herself as an artist and a person from the behavior and practices she disliked. Almost at the same time, British critic Q. D. Leavis printed "Critical Theory of Jane Austen's Writing" in "Scrutiny" in the early 1940s. In there, Leavis argued that Austen was a professional, not an amateur (untrained), writer. Harding's and Leavis's articles were followed by "Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery" (1952). This was written by Martin Mudrick, who saw Austen as lonely, defensive, and critical of her society. He carefully described the connection between Austen's attitude towards the literature of her time and how she used irony to show the difference of how society was, and how she thought it could be. An important British critic, F. R. Leavis, said in "The Great Tradition" (1948) that Austen was one of the great writers of English fiction. Ian Watt agreed, and helped shape the arguments about the genre of the novel. The revisionist views and Leavis's words helped Austen to have a great reputation among academics. They agreed that she "combined (put together) <nowiki>[</nowiki>Henry Fielding's and Samuel Richardson's<nowiki>]</nowiki> qualities of interiority and irony, realism and satire to form an author superior to (better than) both".
After the Second World War, people began studying Austen more deeply, and in different ways. A great number of people have studied Austen as a political writer. Critic Gary Kelly explains, "Some see her as a political 'conservative' because she seems to defend the established social order. Others see her as sympathetic to 'radical' politics that challenged the established order, especially in the form of critics see Austen's novels , criticizing aspects of the social order but supporting and an open class hierarchy." In "Jane Austen and the War of Ideas" (1975), perhaps the most important of these works, Marilyn Butler argues that Austen was greatly influenced by the principal moral and political arguments of her time, and that she had a partisan, firmly conservative and Christian position in these arguments. Alistair M. Duckworth in "The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen's Novels" (1971) argues that Austen used the concept of the "estate" to symbolise all that was important society, which should be conserved (kept), improved, and passed down to future generations. As Rajeswari Rajan notes, "the idea of a political Austen is no longer seriously challenged". The questions scholars now study include: "the Revolution, war, nationalism, empire, class, 'improvement' [of the estate], the clergy, town versus (against) country, abolition, the professions, female emancipation; whether her politics were Tory, Whig, or radical; whether she was a conservative or a revolutionary, or occupied (kept) a reformist position between these extremes".
In the 1970s and 1980s, Austen studies was influenced by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's "The Madwoman in the Attic" (1979). "The Madwoman in the Attic" explores the "explosive anger" of nineteenth-century female English writers under their "decorous (proper) surfaces". This work, together with other feminist criticism of Austen, has made people see her as a "woman" writer. The interest these critics showed in Austen made people discover and study other women writers in Austen's time. Also, when Julia Prewitt Brown's "Jane Austen's Novels: Social Change and Literary Form" (1979), Margaret Kirkham's "Jane Austen: Feminism and Fiction" (1983), and Claudia L. Johnson's "Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel" (1988) were printed, scholars were no longer able to argue that Austen was firmly "apolitical, or '". Kirkham, for example, said that Austen's thought and that of Mary Wollstonecraft were quite similar. She called them both "Enlightenment feminists". Johnson also places Austen in an eighteenth-century political tradition. However, she notes the influence Austen received from the political novels of the 1790s written by women.
In the late-1980s, 1990s, and 2000s ideological, postcolonial, and Marxist criticism dominated Austen studies. Generating heated debate, Edward Said devoted a chapter of his book "Culture and Imperialism" (1993) to "Mansfield Park", arguing that the peripheral position of "Antigua" and the issue of slavery demonstrated that colonial oppression was an unspoken assumption of English society during the early nineteenth century. In "Jane Austen and the Body: 'The Picture of Health"', (1992) John Wiltshire explored the preoccupation with illness and health of Austen's characters. Wiltshire addressed current theories of "the body as sexuality", and more broadly how culture is "inscribed" on the representation of the body. There has also been a return to considerations of aesthetics with D. A. Miller's "Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style" (2003) which connects artistic concerns with queer theory.
List of chess openings
Chess openings are listed and classified according to their first few moves. There are some interesting statistics on the frequency of chess openings, from chess data bases.