Abstract
The Romantic concept of artistic influence—arising in the eighteenth century and finding new expression in Harold Bloom's concept of “anxiety”—presupposes a genealogical model of literary evolution and development, one in which the great achievements of revered ancestors at once overshadow and inspire their literary descendants. This is hardly less arbitrarily unjust or patriarchal than the actual system of patrilineal inheritance consolidated in the eighteenth century, forming the backbone of the British economy and its law, and providing the historical background to Jane Austen's novels. Austen's position as just another disinherited daughter of the gentry class no doubt fuelled her critical, even cynical view of her society, its shortcomings and hypocrisies. This essay argues that her attitude towards literature was equally critical. Paying particular attention to the way in which Austen's Emma (1815) “reads” literature as diverse as Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and Mary Brunton's Discipline (1814), this essay demonstrates Austen's career-long preoccupation with the nature and practice of reading, and her attempts to train an ideally critical reader. It is through such active, critical, objective reading that Austen developed her manifesto for a new kind of novel in the face of ongoing cultural conservatism—a form which, unburdened by the influence of heroic predecessors, could maintain its connections with a rich literary heritage without suffering from the creativity-stifling anxieties of poetic influence.
Published Version
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