A Companion to Jane Austen Studies

Robert Thomas Lambdin, Laura Lambdin

• Publisher: Greenwood
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN:
  9780313306624
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780313032387
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Jane Austen significantly shaped the development of the English novel, and her works continue to be read widely today. Though she is best known for her novels, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion, she also wrote poems, letters, prayers and various pieces of juvenalia. These writings have been attracting the attention of scholars; her major works have already generated a large body of scholarly and critical studies. This reference is a guide to her works and the response to them.

Austen's works are fraught with ambiguity. Because she was adept at displaying numerous aspects of an issue, her writings invite multiple interpretations. In light of the ambiguity of her texts, each of her major works is approached from a reader-response perspective, in which an expert contributor illuminates the reader's relationship to her writing. And because so many readers have had such varied responses to her novels, the volume also includes chapters summarizing the critical response to each of her major works. In addition, the book includes separate chapters on her poems, letters, and prayers.

Table of contents

• Introduction
• 1 Sense and Sensibility: A Convergence of Readers/Viewers/Browsers Rebecca Stephens Duncan
• 2 A Critical History of Sense and Sensibility Rebecca Stephens Duncan
• 3 The Oppositional Reader and Pride and Prejudice Johanna M. Smith
• 4 Pride and Prejudice: Jane Austen and Her Readers Elizabeth Langland
• 5 Fanny Price’s “Customary” Subjectivity: Rereading the Individual in Mansfield Park Anne B. McGrail
• 6 The Critical History of Mansfield Park J. Pat Rogers
• 7 Lampoon and Lampoonability: Emma and the Riddle of Popularity Thomas Dabbs
• 8 “And Very Good Lists They Were”: Select Critical Readings of Jane Austen’s Emma Richard McDonald
• 9 Rereading Jane Austen: Dialogic Feminism in Northanger Abbey Carole Gerster
• 10 Austen’s Northanger Abbey: A Bibliographic Study James R. Keller
• 11 Persuasion’s Box of Contradictions Claudia Stein
• 12 Degrees of Maturity: The Bibliographic History of Jane Austen’s Persuasion Laura Cooner Lambdin and Robert Thomas Lambdin
• 13 The Juvenilia: Energy Versus Sympathy Juliet McMaster
• 14 Child’s Play: A Short Publication and Critical History of Jane Austen’s Juvenilia Eric Daffron
• 15 Tender Toes, Bow-wows, Meow-meows and the Devil: Jane Austen and the Nature of Evil Paula Buck
• 16 Lady Susan: A Bibliographical Essay Deborah Knuth
• 17 On the Virtues of Stout Half-Boots, Speculation and a Little Fresh Hair Powder: A Political, Yet Jovial, Reading of Jane Austen’s The Watsons Laura Hamblin
• 18 The Watsons: Critical Interpretations Maureen Hourigan
• 19 Jane Austen’s Sanditon Peggy Huey
• 20 Jane Austen’s Letters in the Nineteenth Century: The Politics of Nostalgia Stephanie Moss
• 21 Humor and Wit in Jane Austen’s Poems and Charades Laura Cooner Lambdin and Robert Thomas Lambdin
• 22 Jane Austen’s Prayers: Deism Becoming Theism Elton E. Smith
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• About the Editors and Contributors