Jane Austen
Ασπασία Βελισσαρίου
Jane Austen
6th semester, elective
Professor A. Velissariou
The course discusses Austen’s novels in the sociopolitical context of early nineteenth-century England by focusing on the cracks in the moral and economic aristocratic hegemony. Without losing sight of Austen’s political conservativism my reading concentrates on the contradictions and ambiguities in gender representations. I treat them as telling instances of a kind of narrative which cannot always contain the oppositional voices that the author herself has constructed in order to control them. Austen’s language, therefore, is thoroughly analysed as an imprint of her embarrassment in the face of female desire, while, at the same time, plot manipulations are emphasised as the means to which she resorts in order to contain it. Therefore, the “happy end” which closes the narrative, for all its didacticism, or rather because of it, betrays precisely this kind of embarrassment.
- Introduction: Historical overview
The Realist novel
- Jane Austen (1775-1817) and her time
- Jane Austen and conventions of narrative
- Sense and Sensibility (1811)*
- Pride and Prejudice (1813)*
- Mansfield Park(1814)
- Emma (1816)*
- Northanger Abbey (1817)
- Persuasion (posthumously 1818)*
Bibliography:
Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination. New Haven, 1979. Read everything concerning Jane Austen.
Todd, Janet. Gender, Art and Death. Cambridge, 1993. Read chapters 8 and 9.
Walder, Dennis. The Realist Novel. London, 1995. Read ONLY Edward Said, Raymond Williams and Arnold Kettle.
All three books are on reserve in the library.
Λιγότερα
Jane Austen
6th semester, elective
Professor A. Velissariou
The course discusses Austen’s novels in the sociopolitical context of early nineteenth-century England by focusing on the cracks in the moral and economic aristocratic hegemony. Without losing sight of Austen’s political conservativism my reading concentrates on the contradictions and ambiguities in gender representations. I treat them as telling instances of a kind of narrative which cannot always contain the oppositional voices that the author herself has constructed in order to control them. Austen’s language, therefore, is thoroughly analysed as an imprint of her embarrassment in the face of female desire, while, at the same time, plot manipulations are emphasised as the means to which she resorts in order to contain it. Therefore, the “happy end” which closes the narrative, for all its didacticism, or rather because of it, betrays precisely this kind of embarrassment.
- Introduction: Historical overview
Jane Austen
6th semester, elective
Professor A. Velissariou
The course discusses Austen’s novels in the sociopolitical context of early nineteenth-century England by focusing on the cracks in the moral and economic aristocratic hegemony. Without losing sight of Austen’s political conservativism my reading concentrates on the contradictions and ambiguities in gender representations. I treat them as telling instances of a kind of narrative which cannot always contain the oppositional voices that the author herself has constructed in order to control them. Austen’s language, therefore, is thoroughly analysed as an imprint of her embarrassment in the face of female desire, while, at the same time, plot manipulations are emphasised as the means to which she resorts in order to contain it. Therefore, the “happy end” which closes the narrative, for all its didacticism, or rather because of it, betrays precisely this kind of embarrassment.
- Introduction: Historical overview
