Uses of Austen
Subtitle: Jane's afterlives
By: edited by Gillian Dow and Clare Hanson
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire [UK]; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 243
ISBN-13: 9780230319462
Subjects: Appreciation; English literature; Adaptations; Feminism in literature; History and criticism; Influence; History
Description: This collection of essays focuses on the ways in which the life and work of Jane Austen is being re-framed and re-imagined in 20th and 21st-century literature and culture. Tracing the connections between the construction of a Modernist Jane Austen in the early 20th century and feminist and post-feminist appropriations of her texts in the later 20th century, the essays in this volume also examine the ways in which Austen has more recently emerged as a complex point of reference on the global stage, her novels being adapted in settings ranging from Amritsar to California, her name being invoked in political discourse on internet sites and in the printed press as shorthand for English or more broadly Western liberal cultural values. The volume is distinctive in its international scope, and in its focus on Austen as a dynamic cultural signifier. Together, the essays explore the richness and complexity of the cultural encounters generated through re-inscriptions of an imagined 'Jane Austen', and ask what they can tell us about contemporary desires for cultural authority and authenticity.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 228-238) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction / Gillian Dow and Clare Hanson; title: 'A genius for foretelling': Augustan Austen and future fiction / Deidre Lynch; title: 'England's Jane': the legacy of Jane Austen in the fiction of Barbara Pym, Dodie Smith and Elizabeth Taylor / Maroula Joannou; title: 'The future of Pemberley': Emma Tennant, the 'Classic progression' and literary trespassing / Rebecca Munford; title: New approaches to Austen and the popular reader / Juliette Wells; title: Jane Austen's life on page and screen / Julian North; title: Letters to Jane: Austen, the letter and twentieth-century women's writing / William May; title: At home with Jane: placing Austen in contemporary culture / Felicity James; title: Uses of translation: the global Jane Austen / Gillian Dow; title: The ethics of geography: women as readers and dancers in Gurinder Chadha's Bride and prejudice (2004) / Stephanie Jones; title: 'Bin Laden a huge Jane Austen fan': Jane Austen in contemporary political discourse / Mary Ann O'Farrell; title: What would Jane do? Postfeminist media uses of Austen and the Austen reader / Shelley Cobb.