Perhaps more than any figure whose work falls in the “long eighteenth century,” Jane Austen is beloved by enthusiasts beyond the academy. This Collection highlights scholarship on Austen’s life, times, contemporaries, and critical afterlives. It is curated by Devoney Looser and Jessica Richard. Click Join Us to contribute.
The Jane Austen-Bernie Sanders Memes: Too Funny or Too Political?
Guess where else Bernie Sanders showed up: in Jane Austen’s Regency England.
“My Poor Nerves”: Women of a Certain Age on the Page
When women’s lives are divided into maid, mother, crone, it is easy to overlook the moment between early motherhood and old age. How did (and how do) women deal with life in their forties when their children are entering those “most interesting” and “most trying” times of their lives while they themselves are in “the most dangerous”? Are they objects of ridicule?
Paragons of wisdom? Are they even visible at all?
Jane Austen Summer Program 2019
The award-winning Jane Austen Summer Program is excited to announce its 2019 symposium, “Pride and Prejudice and Its Afterlives!” The seventh annual event will take place this June 20-23 in Carrboro and Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Jane Austen, the Prince of Wales, and Mr. Trump
What would Jane Austen say about Donald Trump? Easy to answer, because she had seen it all before. A Regency girl in a golden age of satire, she attacked the Prince of Wales for his much-lampooned appearance, his lewdness, his licentiousness, his instability, his outrageous spending, his fondness for over-the-top building ventures, his implicit treason, his desire for absolute power, his vanity, his braggadocio, and his love of holidays and sport.
The Making of Jane Austen: Going Behind the Scenes of the First Hollywood Pride and Prejudice (1940)
Exploring the archives at the “Oscars Library” to learn about the making of the 1940 Hollywood film version of Pride and Prejudice.
Keeping Marriage Spicy With Jane Austen
Author Ted Scheinman on how cosplaying Jane Austen helps older couples keep their marriages exciting.
Jane Austen Summer Program Presents “Northanger Abbey and Frankenstein: 200 Years of Horror”
This summer more than 100 people, from readers to writers to scholars, will gather at the sixth-annual Jane Austen Summer Program to celebrate the bicentenary of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Austen and the Anthropocene
Modern adaptations of Jane Austen’s works rarely emphasize climate change. The intrigues of Austen’s protagonists are capacious enough to accommodate murder mysteries, high school dramas, and even zombies. Yet climate fiction, or “cli-fi,” has yet to re-imagine Longbourn, Mansfield Park, or Donwell Abbey.
Jane Austen Summer Program Presents: “200 Years of Persuasion”
UNC-CH & JASNA-NC will host the fifth-annual Jane Austen Summer Program from June 15-18, ’17 to explore this year’s chosen theme: “200 Years of Persuasion.”
The Great Forgetting: Women Writers Before Austen
The Great Forgetting: Women Writers Before Austen is a free podcast series addressing the lives and works of eighteenth-century women writers, devised and produced by one journalist and three academics. One day while chatting on Twitter, Helen Lewis (deputy editor of the New Statesman, a leading British weekly magazine focusing on politics and culture) Jennie Batchelor (University of Kent), Sophie Coulombeau (Cardiff University), and Elizabeth Edwards (University of Wales) discovered that they shared not only a love of eighteenth-century women’s writing, but also a conviction that the world needed to know more about it. An idea was born: a six-part podcast series, aimed at the non-specialist listener, about the lives, works and legacies of the women who changed the face of literature – but had, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, been gradually subjected to what Clifford Siskin calls ‘The Great Forgetting’.
Jane Austen Summer Program Presents: “Mansfield Park & Its Afterlives”
This summer, more than 100 people, including Austen fans, established scholars, graduate students, K-12 teachers, and aspiring authors, will have the opportunity to hear expert speakers and participate in discussion groups on Austen’s most controversial novel, Mansfield Park.
Jane Austen Summer Program
Don’t miss this year’s Jane Austen Summer Program—held on UNC’s campus June 12-15, 2014.
The Eighteenth-Century Settings of Walter Scott’s Waverley Novels
I don’t expect Walter Scott’s novels to be re-imagined to include kilt-wearing vampires any time soon. But I am confident that readers interested in the eighteenth century would be drawn to Scott’s representations and interpretations of what he recognized as a tumultuous and exuberant age.
Manners Envy
In her capacious understanding of not just the hows of behavior in public places, but the whys of behavior in public spaces, Austen prefigures the development of micro-sociology, those analyses of specific rituals, such as Georg Simmel’s study of cocktail party talk and flirtation, or Erving Goffman’s later analysis of civil inattention (how not to attract stranger’s attention on the street) or waiting room or elevator behavior.
Austen’s Domestic Fiction and the Network Form
Counter to my own argument in Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987) that domestic fiction proposes a self-enclosed household as a model for the modern nation, I’m contending that each Austen novel tears open the traditional household and disperses its members (especially daughters) by putting them into circulation.
What Jane Saw: New Virtual Gallery Reconstructs Art Exhibit Attended by Jane Austen
The Department of English at The University of Texas at Austin launches an online reconstruction of a famous art exhibit as novelist Jane Austen saw it on 24 May 1813 – exactly 200 years ago to the day. The virtual gallery titled “What Jane Saw” (www.whatjanesaw.org) was created by Janine Barchas, Professor of English at The University of Texas at Austin, and constructed by a team of student assistants and staff in the Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services.
Pride & Prejudice at 200
Megan Mulder contextualizes Wake Forest University’s first edition of Pride and Prejudice and Devoney Looser reviews two new books that examine Austen’s enduring appeal.
Happy (Recent) Birthday, Jane Austen!
Recent posts around the web marking Jane Austen’s birthday.
Cognitive Science and the Humanities in 18th-Century Studies
“This is your brain on Jane Austen…” What role should developments in cognitive science play in humanities research?
Guns and Austen
Guns in C18 Fiction, Jane Austen and presidential narratives, Austen in Montreal…