Full Description
This collection of twelve new essays examines some of what Jane Austen has become in the two hundred years since her death. Some of the chapters explore adaptations or repurposings of her work while others trace her influence on a surprising variety of different kinds of writing, sometimes even when there is no announced or obvious debt to her. In so doing they also inevitably shed light on Austen herself. Austen is often considered romantic and not often considered political, but both those perceptions are challenged her, as is the idea that she is primarily a writer for and about women. Her books are comic and ironic, but they have been reworked and drawn upon in very different genres and styles. Collectively these essays testify to the extraordinary versatility and resonance of Austen's books.
Contents
1. Lisa Hopkins, Introduction.- 2. Clare Bainbridge, 'What to Wear and How to Eat It: the Aristocratic Novel After Jane Austen'.- 3. Sarah Dredge, 'Changing their Quarters: Unsettled Forces in Pride and Prejudice and North and South'.- 4. Lisa Hopkins, 'Georgette Heyer: What Austen Left Out'.- 5. Stacy Gillis, 'Manners, Money, and Marriage: Austen, Heyer, and the Literary Genealogy of the Regency Romance'.- 6. Nora Foster Stovel, 'Modernising Jane Austen: the HarperCollins Project'.- 7. Camilla Nelson, 'A Feminist in a Dazzling Dress: Curtis Sittenfeld's Eligible and the Marriage Industrial Complex'.- 8. Gill Ballinger, 'Adapting Austen "for the new generation": ITV's 2007 Trilogy Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion'.- 9. Leigh Wetherall-Dickson, 'The 'story-telling' wardrobe of Lady Susan'.- 10. Juliette Wells, '"Dear Aunt Jane": Agatha Christie's Miss Marple and Jane Austen'.- 11. Barbara MacMahon, 'Jane Austen, free indirect style, gender and interiority in literary fiction'.- 12. Janice Wardle, 'Austenland and narrative tension in Austen's biopics'.- 13. Katherine Johnson, 'Literary Heritage Writ Large at the Jane Austen Festival, Bath'.
