Full Description
This book makes connections between selfhood, reading practice and moral judgment which propose fresh insights into Austen's narrative style and offer new ways of reading her work. It grounds her writing in the Enlightenment philosophy of selfhood, exploring how Austen takes five major components of selfhood theory—memory, imagination, probability, sympathy and reflection—and investigates their relation to self-formation and moral judgement. At the same time, Austen's narrative style breaks new ground in the representation of consciousness and engages directly with contemporary concerns about reading practice. Drawing analogies between reading text and reading character, the book argues that Austen's rendering of reading and rereading as both reflective and constitutive acts demonstrates their capacity to enable self-recognition and self-formation. It shows how Austen raises questions about the potential for different readings and, in so doing, challenges her readers to reflect on and reread their own interactions with her texts.
Contents
Introduction: Selfhood and the Novel.- Chapter One: Memory: Continuity, Coherence and Self-construction.- Chapter Two: Imagination and the Creative Self: The Reader and the Writer.- Chapter Three: Proofs, Probabilities and Ambiguities.- Chapter Four: Sympathy: The Self and Society.- Chapter Five: The Reflecting Self: Self-examination and Moral Judgement.- Chapter Six: Reflection, Reading Practice and Self-formation.- Conclusion.
