Thank you Netgalley for letting me read and review this book. I like reading anything by or about Jane Austen. I think any fans of Austen should read this.

A must read for any Jane Austen fan. This book gave an interesting insight to the novels of Jane Austen and I am keen to reread them in relation to this new knowledge.

This is fantastic and an absolutely essential read for fans of Jane Austen. I found a lot of useful context for her novels in this book and will be rereading them soon as I'm sure I will discover things I had not previously considered before reading this book.

Engaging the Age of Jane Austen: Public Humanities in Practice was an invigorating and exciting look at how deep connections can be made between 18th-century literature and the needs of students and the public today. The authors and contributors made an excellent argument for the importance of studying the humanities in general and literature in particular.
I am inspired by the innovative projects that the authors used in their classrooms to help their students make connections between the past and the present; make connections between ideas presented in canonical and non-canonical literature and ideas we wrestle with today; and finally giving them hands-on experience with bringing ideas to the public in a wide variety of ways.
I highly recommend this book to teachers and scholars who are looking to make their work relevant to public audiences, who want to build strong relationships with their community, and who want to better be able to answer questions about why the humanities and literature are vital.

Thank you NetGalley for a free eARC in exchange for an honest review. While the book was interesting in regards to literary scholars, I was disappointed that it was not about Jane Austen. I thought the title was somewhat misleading.

The author did a brilliant job of explaining the importance of a career as a literary scholar. I had never heard of this being a full time career, so this book was really interesting to me.

So I feel like this was a bit of a bait and switch for Jane Austen fans. I was expecting a look at her life and work by various humanities scholars. Instead, this was a look at how humanities scholars relate to their work.
Many thanks to NetGalley, the publisher, and the author. All opinions are my own.

“Engaging the Age of Jane Austen” was everything I was hoping for and more… To say that this book was a worthwhile reading experience wouldn’t be enough: it inspired and challenged me to reflect, the authors ending, in the spirit of the quest for lifelong learning, with a series of questions which then helped me formulate others that would apply to my future experience as a Humanities scholar and teacher.

Each essay focuses on projects grounded in publicly engaged teaching and research performed in particular places (the museum, the library, and the archive), describing the methods integrated and other various aspects: difficulties, accomplishments, happy accidents, and unexpected connections encountered along the way. The idea is to encourage faculty members, instructors, professors, and teachers to design and implement activities that would be accessible to and engage a wider community.

If you’re reading this hoping that the book concentrates solely on Jane Austen’s novels and the study of eighteenth-century literature filtered through twenty-first-century issues, you need to be warned that this is only the starting point. There are essays that drifts away from Austen and how her characters could resonate with today’s readers, to show students (and adults alike) that reading literature, in general, and eighteenth-century authors, in particular, is more than “an act of unthinking, escapist consumption, a privileged activity that is disconnected from reality in any meaningful way.” Literary study inherently encourages self-reflective practices and “helps disenfranchised people and populations recover agency over their own narratives.”

This is the perfect example of reading the right book at the right time: “Engaging the Age of Jane Austen” deals with a topic that has been on my mind for the most part of my final years of study, and, as I am currently working on my doctoral thesis, which I’ll be defending next year, I need to start thinking not only where I want to go next, since teaching is what I know I’ll be doing, but also how I will allow the academic in me join me in the classroom. I know she can dial the jargon & disciplinary standards down a notch to get my point across!

I recommend this to anyone how wonders how they can make better use of their academic training and how they can make teaching more interdisciplinary, community conscious, and therefore more publicly engaged for the younger generation.

I had so many “aha moments” that I can’t thank the authors enough!

It was interesting even if I thought it was about Jane Austern and her age.
A good read for anyone interested in humanities.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC

Engaging the Age of Jane Austin is a book for Humanities scholar. What can and should someone with a humanities degree pursue in life. As a political science student, I learned what Noam Chomsky called the duty of intellectuals -- IT IS THE RESPONSIBILITY of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies. Plenty of work in that field. Humanities students have a challenging course to plot if they want to remain true to their field. Granted they do not build bridges, design computers, or lead in discoveries, but they do reflect society and culture.

Spratt, Draxler, and others look at ways to engage students in the spirit of the humanities. Teaching reading to adults, reproducing old texts into electronic format (think something like the Guttenburgpress.com) and making them available to the public, and social justice programs (something in line with Jane Austen's era). Liberal Arts, which Humanities fall under, are losing in public opinion and rather useless in today's world and economy. The public needs to be reminded that we are a result of the humanities. These are what shaped us as a society and a culture. It is our literature, history, diversity, journalism, art, and music that make us what we are. As our society narrows its views into two separate and defined camps, our vision needs to expand. Austen lived in exciting times: The American and French revolutions, the abolition of slavery, extended suffrage, industrialization. Reflected in her work are these events preserved for all. Spratt, Draxler, and other writers look to find ways to make humanities important to society again.