Matters of Fact in Jane Austen: History, Location, and Celebrity
An impeccably researched new book.(Examiner.com)Matters of Fact in Jane Austenis 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 LooserLos 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 SachsTimes 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.(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 HalseyReview of English Studies)This is a huge achievement.(Sarah RaffNineteenth-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 ofMansfield 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 Austenis 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 ofIt)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 Austenproceeds 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 CollegeABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts)One of the most elegant new critical books I've encountered recently... a very original and well-researched, sometimes mind-blowing study of the numerous real-world people who stand 'behind' individual Austen characters. Barchas is stunning, for example, onNorthanger Abbey,one of Austen's more elusive fictions.(Terry CastleThe Lumière Reader)'Meticulous' will also inevitably be the word most often used to describe Janine Barchas’s latest book. The research that has informedMatters of Fact in Jane Austen:History, Location, and Celebrityis abundant and careful, making this a fascinating and fresh take on Austen studies. Much like the 'What Jane Saw' website, the bookstarts from the contention that Austen was well aware of and sensitive to the news and newsmakers of her day, and that the realities of her specific historical moment influence aspects of her novels.(Studies in the Novel)Critics have often recognized Austen’s care with locational details in particular, but have done little more. Barchas’s compelling geographical and spatial arguments... had me reading with my iPad in hand, toggling between various maps of Bath and the book … A Google maps assignment awaits my England summer study-abroad students-cum-surveyors.(Eighteenth-Century Fiction)