Teaching & Learning Guide for: Jane Austen and the Public Sphere

Abstract

Author Recommends: The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, edited by Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster (Cambridge UP, 1997) has useful essays on ‘Class’ and ‘Money’ as well as ‘Style’ and on individual novels, reflecting a new awareness of Austen’s participation in a discourse rather wider than the initially domestic focus of her novels might suggest.Edward Said’s reading of Mansfield Park in the contexts of its significant silence over the West Indian plantation owned by Sir Thomas Bertram is one of the most contentious attempts to bring politics to Austen’s world, seen by many critics as ignorant or uninterested in wider issues. Said’s Culture and Imperialism (Vintage, 1995) has been variously challenged, including in John Sutherland’s Is Heathcliff a Murderer?: Puzzles in Nineteenth‐Century Fiction (Oxford UP, 1996).For a visual adaptation of the novel influenced by Said’s activation of its colonial subtext, see the film Mansfield Park directed by Patricia Rozema (1999).The journal Eighteenth Century Studies special issue on ‘The Public and the Nation’ (29, 1995), includes a number of relevant essays, including Lawrence E. Klein’s investigation of ‘Gender and the Public/Private Distinction in the Eighteenth Century: Some Questions about Evidence and Analytic Procedure’: Klein genders the Habermasian model and critiques binary assumptions of private‐female public‐male.Online Materials:The refereed online journal Romanticism on the Net has scholarly articles and reviews: http://www.ron.umontreal.ca/Jane Austen’s writings can be accessed online via http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/janewrit.html.