Title: Jane Austen and religion
First published: 2002
Description: "Jane Austen in often thought of as a secular author, because religion seems absent from her novels, because she satirises her clerical characters, and because the history of literary criticism - and the literary sensibility of the twenty-first century reader - is overwhelmingly secular. Michael Giffin offers a reading of Austen's published novels against the background of a 'long eighteenth century' that stretched from the Restoration to the end of the Georgian period.

He demonstrates that Austen is a neoclassical author of the Enlightenment who writes through the twin prisms of British Empiricism and Georgian Anglicanism. His focus is on how Austen's novels mirror a belief in natural law and natural order; and how they reflect John Locke's theory of knowledge through reason, revelation and reflection on experience.

His reading suggests there is a thread of neoclassical philosophy and theology running through and between each of Austen's novels, which is best understood in its cultural context."--BOOK JACKET.
Subjects: History, Religion, Christian fiction, English, Literature and society, History and criticism, Christianity and literature, Religion in literature, English Christian fiction, Austen, jane, 1775-1817, Great britain, history
Places: England
People: Jane Austen (1775-1817)
LC classification: PR4038.R4 G54 2002