Why Jane Austen?
by Rachel M. Brownstein
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Pub Date Jun 07 2011 | Archive Date Sep 01 2012
Description
**UNCORRECTED PROOF**
From the first publication of Pride and Prejudice to recent film versions of her life and work, Jane Austen continues to inspire fantasies of peculiar intimacy and provoke enthusiasm and debate. Celebrated in the nineteenth century for her realism and patrician gentility, condemned by some second-wave feminists but adored by others, imagined now as politically conservative and then as subversively satirical, Austen generates passions shaped by ideologies and trends-as well as by her own memorable stories, characters, and elusive, perennially cool tone.
In this book, Rachel M. Brownstein considers Jane Austen as heroine, moralist, satirist, romantic, woman, and author, along with the changing notions of these categories over time and texts. She finds echoes of many of Austen's insights and techniques in contemporary Jane-o-mania, a commercially driven, erotically charged popular vogue that aims to preserve and liberate, correct and collaborate with old Jane. Brownstein's brilliant discussion of the distinctiveness and distinction of the novelist's genius clarifies the reasons why we read Jane Austen-or why we should read her-and reorients the prevailing view of her work. Reclaiming the rich comedy of Austen while building a new narrative of authorship, Brownstein unpacks the novelist's fascinating entanglement with her readers and admirers.
Rachel M. Brownstein is professor of English at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of two critically acclaimed books, Becoming a Heroine: Reading about Women in Novels and Tragic Muse: Rachel of the Comedie-Francaise.
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Advance Praise
“Why Jane Austen? is a warmhearted, personal, and humane meditation on Austen and Austenolatry. It is also, in the tradition of Becoming a Heroine, smart, witty, eloquent and joyfully wide-ranging, a mixture of anecdote, cultural criticism, biography, literary history, and close reading. By bringing serious literary thought to a wider audience-the book is accessible to anyone acquainted with Austen’s novels—it performs one of the most important services of humanistic scholarship.”
—William Deresiewicz, author of Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets
“Rachel Brownstein’s smart and often charming book re-engages and reinvigorates Lionel Trilling’s question “why we read Jane Austen,” a matter that Austen scholars know is of cultural as well as personal import. Brownstein writes with the assurance and comfort of a senior scholar surveying the terrain—she is opinionated in the best sense—but she also writes from a place of considerable and valuable self-consciousness. Parts of the book serve as memoir: of her life as a teacher, as a scholar asked in public and private social encounters to serve as representative and explainer of Austen the cultural icon, as a reader whose contexts for Austen have changed with changing geography and changing social meanings. It is one of Brownstein’s contentions that, reading Austen and seeking her, we find ourselves.”
—Mary Ann O’Farrell, Texas A&M University
Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9780231153904 |
| PRICE | 29.50 |
| PAGES | 320 |
