The Mansfield Park of the title, a magnificent, idyllic estate which is home to the wealthy Bertram family, stands as a bastion of English tradition and stability. The novel's heroine, Fanny Price, is a "poor relation" living with the Bertrams, acutely conscious of her inferior status and yet daring to love their son Edmund--but from afar. Howev...more
Northanger Abbey depicts the misadventures of Catherine Morland, young, ingenuous, and mettlesome, and an indefatigable reader of gothic novels. Their romantic excess and dark overstatement feed her imagination, as tyrannical fathers and diabolical villains work their evil on forlorn heroines in isolated settings. What could be more remote ...more
Sense and Sensibility is Austen's first published novel and the one now most scrutinized by historicist and feminist scholars, who offer new, complex readings of the work. The text is that of the 1813 Second Edition (the origins of which can be traced back to 1795). The text is fully annotated and is accompanied by a map of nineteenth-century Engla...more
NORTHANGER ABBEY is about a naïve young woman whose head is full of the Gothic novels she consumes, and who begins to imagine that life may well be even stranger than fiction. Catherine Morland makes a touching, if somewhat charmingly brainless, heroine; Henry Tilney is a self-possessed and witty hero; and the plot device in which Catherine sees Ge...more
Once viewed solely in relation to the history of feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft is now recognized as a writer of formidable talent across a range of genres, including journalism, letters and travel writing, and is increasingly understood as an heir to eighteenth-century literary and political traditions as well as a forebear of romanticism. This Com...more
"The best (and the best written) book about Austen that has appeared in the last three decades."--Nina Auerbach, Journal of English and Germanic Philology"By looking at the ways in which Austen domesticates the gothic in Northanger Abbey, examines the conventions of male inheritance and its negative impact on attempts to define the family as a site...more
Reflecting the dynamic and expansive nature of Austen studies, A Companion to Jane Austen provides 42 essays from a distinguished team of literary scholars that examine the full breadth of the English novelist's works and career. Provides the most comprehensive and up-to-date array of Austen scholarshipFunctions both as a scholarly reference and as...more
In early nineteenth-century England, a spirited young woman copes with the suit of a snobbish gentleman as well as the romantic entanglements of her four sisters. Includes explanatory notes throughout the text, an introduction discussing the author and the background of the story, and a study guide.
In the wake of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke argued that civil order depended upon nurturing the sensibility of men—upon the masculine cultivation of traditionally feminine qualities such as sentiment, tenderness, veneration, awe, gratitude, and even prejudice. Writers as diverse as Sterne, Goldsmith, Burke, and Rousseau were politically mo...more
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