Austen's Mansfield Park Research Articles

The Triumph of the Estate? Fanny Price and Immoral Ownership of Property in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park

Journal for Eighteenth-Century StudiesVolume 44, Issue 4 p. 453-468 Original Article (Special Issue) The Triumph of the Estate? Fanny Price and Immoral Ownership of Property in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park Rita J. Dashwood, Corresponding Author Rita J. Dashwood ritajdashwood@gmail.com Search for more papers by this author Rita J. Dashwood, Corresponding Author Rita J. Dashwood ritajdashwood@gmail.com Search for more papers by this author First published: 29 December 2021 https://doi.org/10.1111/1754-0208.12800Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume44, Issue4Special Issue: Women and Property in the Long Eighteenth CenturyDecember 2021Pages 453-468 RelatedInformation

Kierkegaardian Inwardness and the Good Life in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park

Abstract Jane Austen's Mansfield Park can be read through the lens of a Kierkegaardian interpretive option that allows us to see the novel as endorsing inwardness, a choice for the internal over the external, for that which is identical to our selves over that which is distinct from our selves. There is freedom in choosing inwardness, Kierkegaard maintains. So, since Fanny Price, Mansfield Park's beleaguered protagonist, chooses a life lived in pursuit of inwardness, we can see her as securing her own emancipation: she is free, liberated, in a way that distinguishes her from other characters in Mansfield Park.

The Novel Stage: Narrative Form from the Restoration to Jane Austen by Marcie Frank

Reviewed by: The Novel Stage: Narrative Form from the Restoration to Jane Austen by Marcie Frank Alexandra G. Bennett THE NOVEL STAGE: NARRATIVE FORM FROM THE RESTORATION TO JANE AUSTEN, by Marcie Frank. Transits: Literature, Thought and Culture, 1650-1850. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2020. 230 pp. $120.00 hardback; $34.95 paperback; $34.95 ebook. Though Marcie Frank's The Novel Stage: Narrative Form from the Restoration to Jane Austen came out in 2020, its subject matter certainly resonates at this moment, when theaters around the world have been forced to adapt their craft to new forms of media for over a year. As a drama specialist and a theater practitioner, I tend to assume that genres are inherently collaborative and intertwined and that influence is reciprocal and might be both innovative and hearken back to past ideas simultaneously; these threads are part of the warp and weft of my work. It therefore came as some surprise to me, I have to admit, when I understood that a common perspective posits dramatic and novelistic genres as not only distinct but opposed in fundamental ways, as if novels could not be performative nor plays consumed through print. As a counter to this mode of discourse, The Novel Stage works brilliantly, showing how dramatic genres such as tragicomedy, comedy of manners, and melodrama fundamentally affected the prose writings of figures such as Aphra Behn, the Earl of Rochester, [End Page 398] Elizabeth Inchbald, Henry Fielding, and Jane Austen and how their prose works inherently affected audiences for theatrical genres over time. Not only does Frank explore the ways in which each writer portrayed aspects of theater performance in their works—such as the home performance of Inchbald's Lovers' Vows (1798) in Austen's Mansfield Park (1814)—she also carefully traces the overlapping elements of performance and publication in showing, for instance, how elements of stage action get turned into narrative description in Frances Burney's Evelina (1778). Given that many of the authors she discusses here wrote both plays and prose pieces of varying lengths, the intertwining of genres makes excellent sense, and Frank clearly shows how each form influenced the other during the course of the eighteenth century. Loud cheers and huzzahs are also due for Frank's insistence that none of these writers worked in isolation and that the integration of women's writings in reworkings of literary history gives important contextualization that separating "women's writing" into a subgroup might omit. The process of writing in any period is a tension between novelty and tradition, a process of saying "yes, and . . ." as the best improvisers do; indeed, one of the impressions from the book's argument is that the development of genre in this particular time period was one of both improvisation and careful connection so as to appeal to as wide an entertainment-seeking audience as possible. (This seems especially timely now, when the demand for entertainment sparks both innovation and rehashes of older popular material in the effort to drive more eyes to various media services.) Frank is fully aware of the wider implications of her re-examination of genre in the eighteenth century. Defamiliarizing the relationships between plays and novels not only as forms of writing but as aspects of media consumption enables her to question the idealized aesthetic autonomy that underpins some previous histories of the novel as "a fantasy deriving from a Hegelian aesthetics whose influence is still to be found in the prizing of objects whose form recapitulates their content" (p. 154). Instead, by showing some of the ways in which print and performance informed and fed the demand for one another through this time period, Frank opens up the discussion of literary history as one that is far more collaborative and dialectical than might previously have been posited in the transition from thinking of writing as "poetry" to the classification of "literature." As energizing as Frank's exploration of the interweaving of drama and novel is, it also implicitly emphasizes some of the remaining frameworks that underpin current literary studies, such as the time-bound silos of periodization. For instance, Behn's use of both dramatic and novelistic forms...

Liberalism and Inner Life: The Curious Cases of Mansfield Park and Villette

Abstract This article takes up two famously disliked nineteenth-century novels—Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and Charlotte Brontë's Villette—and argues that they are dissatisfying to readers because their protagonists fail to cohere as liberal subjects around a legible interior realm. Mansfield Park initially offers its east room as a spatial analogue for Fanny Price's interior, but it gradually revokes narrative access to the space in order to defer wholly to external status markers. Likewise, Villette's Lucy Snowe creates architectural constructions as a means of representing her inner realm to an outside world. However, each instance results in an impossible space that fails to establish the contours of Lucy's interior. The article reads the failures of subjectivation in the two novels in light of critical accounts that link the nineteenth-century novel to liberalism, a link that is often established through a shared emphasis on the interior. It thus examines what could come next once such a link is broken: a reevaluation of the default political perspective of the nineteenth-century novel but also a renewed understanding of the variety of subjective forms that liberalism is able to capture.

"Giving voice to the tireless relish of life": Listening for the Plantation in Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding and Jane Austen's Mansfield Park

"Giving voice to the tireless relish of life": Listening for the Plantation in Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding and Jane Austen's Mansfield Park

Plants and Literature: Essays in Critical Plant Studies

Randy Laist's Plants and Literature is the first book published in an innovative and important new Rodopi series, Critical Plant Studies: Philosophy, Literature, Culture. Edited by noted philosopher of plant life Michael Marder, this series seeks to raise ethical sensitivity about the instrumentalization of plants (agriculture, recent advances in molecular biology, genetic engineering, etc.) and initiate interdisciplinary dialogue that might parallel the way animal ethics has responded to the animal–industrial complex. The book illustrates that this new interdisciplinary approach (playfully named “vegetal ecocriticism” in a 2013 ASLE preconference seminar co-taught by Catriona Sandilands and me) will fast gain critical mass among ISLE readers in general, and scholars interested in material ecocriticism and biosemiotics specifically. As one might expect of a rapidly developing critical approach, most of the contributors to Plants and Literature are engaged in their doctoral studies or just entering the professoriate. This is understandable, given that—as editor Randy Laist notes—contemporary knowledge of the vegetal has largely been lost to corporate plant breeders resulting in a “defoliation of the cultural imagination” (10). The book's contributors dive into this void, and while the essays are not all uniformly strong, each author chooses a thought-provoking topic and writes about it with an enthusiasm that is infectious. Ecocritical scholars have long paid excellent respect to literature's varied renderings of flowers, shrubs, and trees, and a number of essays examining classic Anglo-European and American canonical literature (Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Christina Rossetti's “Goblin Market,” and Nathaniel Hawthorne's “Rappaccini's Daughter”) build on this strong foundation. Other enjoyable essays examine myth, art, literature, film, and science fiction replete with depictions of evil plants, salvific plants, and human–plant hybrids (Little Shop of Horrors and Oryx and Crake). More cutting-edge essays read at the intersections of science studies and philosophy. Charlotte Pylyser's analysis of Brecht Evens's The Making Of, for example, engages with the plant-strewn pages of graphic novel art parody and raises questions about the ways the actual biological capacities of plants can be effaced when transformed into symbols that come to function in a purely instrumental manner.

The White Female as Effigy and the Black Female as Surrogate in Janet Schaw ’s Journal of a Lady of Quality and Jane Austen’S Mansfield Park

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, debates over the propriety of the institution of slavery in the Empire were at the forefront of Great Britain's politics. Numerous cases had been heard in the high courts addressing the status of black individuals--whether free or enslaved--upon soil. As Deirdre Coleman notes, the British public's fascination with complexion can be seen as symptomatic of the period's fascination with new identity and status for Afro-Britons following Lord Mansfield's decision in the Somerset case (1772) (169). Despite the fact that the institution of slavery and its by-products of material wealth and goods pervaded virtually all social strata in some form or fashion, abolitionist efforts, especially among women, were on the rise. White females throughout the empire were becoming ever more aware of their complicity in the perpetuation of this inhumane system. As means of elucidating the way the reality of Caribbean slavery permeated all areas of society, it proves useful to look at the ways Janet Schaw and Jane Austen, two white female authors of the period, represented--or failed to overtly represent--within their writing the institution of slavery and particularly its psychological and physical effects on white females. From 1774-1776, Schaw, wealthy, middle-aged, white, Scottish woman, sailed from Scotland to the West Indies and North Carolina to visit her brothers and their families who had relocated to the New World. During her travels, she penned letters to female friend of like social standing in which she described her journey. These letters were published posthumously as Journal of A Lady of Quality from Scotland to the West Indies, North Carolina, and Portugal, in the years 1774-1776. (1) Four decades after Schaw privately described her adventure, Austen published Mansfield Park, the plot of which centers around an English baronet, who owns property in Antigua, and his family in England. Employing Joseph Roach's concept of the human as presented in Echoes in the Bone, the second chapter of his book Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, where he posits that an economy of slave-produced abundance, expensive young women may come to signify the importance of excess itself, the symbolic crossing point of material production/consumption and reproductive fecundity, I argue, as evidenced in the aforementioned works by Schaw and Austen, that white women ultimately became the living effigies to the black female surrogate victims within the system of slavery (42). To provide further evidence to this attestation, I turn to Joyce Green MacDonald's article Disappearing African Woman: Imoinda in Oroonoko After Behn, in which she notes that as means of justifying their dalliances with their female slaves, at least few white male authors penned accounts in which they attempted to persuade white women of their superiority over black women because of their distance from sullying sexuality, creating a new social and economic status for planters' wives and daughters in the colonies (75). In examining Schaw's A Journal of Lady of Quality and Austen's Mansfield Park through the lens afforded by Roach and MacDonald, one becomes aware of the representation of the white female and black female surrogate. Thus the very concept of woman within the system becomes the monstrous double (Girard 272). In Schaw's words and Austen's deafening silences, the effects of the system of slavery--both psychologically and physically--on white women of the Empire corroborates the concept of their status as effigies. Roach presents multilayered argument for the role of both performance and memory in rituals which accompany dying, death, and the (relocation of the dead among members of the Black Atlantic. (2) The employment of an effigy is vital in the establishment of creative memory. Roach points out, [an effigy] fills by means of surrogation vacancy created by the absence of an original (36). …

The Wordsworths, Opium, and China

Following Edward Said and other post-colonial critics, scholars have become greatly sensitized to colonial and imperial concerns in the 18th and 19th centuries. In Cultural and Imperialism. Said argued. For example, that Sir Thomas Bertram's slave estates in Barbados as source of funding for the domestic English civilization in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park should be taken into account (Said [1994], 100-116). One could argue, however, that the informing colonial and commercial contexts of Mansfield Park is as much China, opium, and tea, as the Caribbean, sugar, and slavery. Profits derived from Frank Austen's private trading at Canton (Guangzhou) in 1812 allowed him to retire from the Roal Navy and to purchase Chawton, where his sister lived and wrote thereafter (Nokes, 361-62, 367). Similarly, officers with the East India such as Wordsworth, brother of the poet, were allowed two tons of their own goods to sell at profit in China, and opium was one of the most profitable of the trades then flourishing. A profit of between [pounds sterling] 4,000 and [pounds sterling] 12,000 could be by East India officers on the round trip to China, and sometimes as high as [pounds sterling] 30,000 (Hayter, 29, 35). The official East India trade in Chinese tea and its unofficial trade in Bengal opium are important, if under-explored, material contexts of the literature and culture of the Romantic period. In this essay, I explore the global implications of this trade for the Wordsworth family and some of William's poetry, China and the opium trade are presences that erupt into the work of the poet in fugitive and unexpected ways. William and Dorothy's beloved brother John, the never-resting pilgrim of the (Home at Grasmere, II. 65+55) traded for the East India at Canton. John's master plan was to spend ten years at sea with the which he entered in 1788, make for both himself and the Wordsworth family, and then retire to Westmoreland. He was closely attached at the time to Mary Hutchinson whom he may have wished to marry, was clearly rising star in the and destined for great things. The Wordsworth's cousin, Captain Wordsworth, had retired after lucrative career at sea and was promising role model for John. The younger wrote in late 1800 that it was his object [...] to get as much money as possible. He was aware that his cousin had made very handsome fortune and that in eigh or so years he himself would be a very rich man (Letters Wordsworth, 74, 77). After voyaging to Barbados, by his cousin's influence, was appointed midshipman on the Earl fo Abergavenny, which took him to China for the first time in 1790. He rose through the merchant ranks from fifth to second time mate (Letters of Wordsworth, 12-13). From 1801 onwards. sailed ot the east twice as Captain of new Earl of Abergavenny, 1200-ton East Indiaman bound for China with some 400 people on board, first captained by his older cousin, John, Captaincy of the Abergavenny was major and much envied posting. Notably, among Wordsworth's cosmopolitan crew and passengers in 1805 were thirty-two Chinese sailors, returning home, as well as African servants, Americans, Danes, Russian, Prussian. Indians, and Portuguese seaman. (1) In addition to undertaking business, senior employees, such as John, also engaged in lucrative private trade in commodities such as tea, silks, and opium. As Richard Matlak comments. John Wordsworth was at the point of salvaging lucrative career as one of the youngest captain of one of the largest vessels in the merchant fleet of the East India Company (18). He hoped to profit from trading opium and the proceeds were intended to support his talented sibling. The material processes of commerce and empire are thus deeply imbricated at one level at least in the great art that both Wordsworth and Austen produced. (2) The issue of the opium trade is historically and ethically complex, but the Wordsworths and the Austens could not have known of the pernicious nature of the drug and its historical part in the growing conflict with China. …

Constancy and the Ethics of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (review)

Constancy and the Ethics of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (review)

Prevention as Narrative in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park

Prevention as Narrative in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park Erika Wright Fanny, feeling all of this to be wrong, could not help making an effort to prevent it. "You will hurt yourself, Miss Bertram," she cried, "you will certainly hurt yourself against those spikes—you will tear your gown—you will be in danger of slipping into the Ha-Ha. You had better not go." —Jane Austen, Mansfield Park In 1802, Thomas Beddoes argued that "[w]ritings intended to warn against the destruction of health, can hardly be confounded with such as pretend to teach the people how to restore it." "To direct a stranger how to traverse slippery ground without injury, is one thing," he says,"[t]o instruct him how to set his leg, should he break it, is quite another" ("Essay II," 35). Or, to quote another of his near-contemporaries, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." To the novelist or the novel reader addicted to the drama of broken legs, however, prevention is not so immediately appealing. As medical historian Ginnie Smith explains it, "prevention...is and was barely newsworthy, being a passive or negative operation" (249). No statistics exist for the number of citizens who remained healthy during a given period, so we can never know if disease has been prevented or if health has simply been maintained. There is, in effect, no story to tell. And yet, as Jane Austen makes clear, teaching prevention is hardly a passive or story-less endeavor, and Mansfield Park, as I shall suggest, is the period's best instruction book in narratives of prevention. Dr. Beddoes made prevention part of his life's work and his project was to convince his readers not to "confound" prevention with cure. In fact, he "explicitly declare [s] PREVENTION of mischief to be [his] exclusive objective" ("Essay II," 13), asking his readers in the second installment of [End Page 377] Hygeia to "bear with [him] yet a few more months, before they give [him] up" ("Essay II," 14) for the "makers of those books...which profess to distribute far and wide a capacity for discriminating diseases and applying remedies" ("Essay II," 19; see also Mitchell v). Beddoes was not alone in this struggle to assert prevention's worth. In his highly popular Domestic Medicine,1 William Buchan acknowledges his reader's presumed disappointment in the dearth of "pompous prescriptions, and promised great cures" (viii) they will find in his manual, asserting that he "would much rather teach men how to avoid the necessity of using [pills and potions], than how they should be used" (ix; see also Lawrence 20-32). Physicians such as Buchan and Beddoes were acutely aware that the anxiety over disease (both moral and medical) and the satisfaction that comes with recovery made for a powerful narrative, one not easy for doctors promoting prevention to overcome.2 People notice health only when they do not have it, and as a result, readers of health manuals want to learn how to get well more than they want to learn how not to get sick. The problem of narrating prevention holds true for the nineteenth-century novel. Indeed, the novel bears much of the responsibility for the seductiveness of the illness-cure trajectory.3 Novels trained their readers to expect conflicts that get resolved, longing that gets rewarded, beginnings that necessarily and steadily move toward an end. As Peter Brooks argues about Great Expectations, "at the end we have the impression of a life that has outlived plot, renounced plot, been cured of it" (138, emphasis added). Cure, in this case, refers to the end of narrative, or what D. A. Miller describes as the "'nonnarratable' state of quiescence assumed by a novel before the beginning and supposedly recovered by it at the end" (Narrative ix, emphasis added). In "The Late Jane Austen," Miller goes further, aligning Austen's novels with his own (and any reader's) body in need of cure and suggesting that the novels "provid[e] the story of recovery" (55). The reader's body, Miller explains, "display[s] the same sanative logic as one of Austen's novels, with the initially alarming symptoms...

Guest Editorial: Vulnerability Revisited

In Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814), Fanny, an 18-year-old orphan who lives with her aunt Lady Bertram, received an attractive offer of marriage, which she vehemently rejected and is not prepared to reconsider.

Sheridan, The School for Scandal, and Aggression

For a canonical play, one that was extremely successful from the start and has occupied a regular place in the repertory ever since the 1770s, Richard Brinsley Sheridan's School for Scandal elicits no consensus from playgoers or readers about what it means or even how it works. Indeed, response is divided on both issues. In proposing to resolve these interpretive problems, I should admit from the start that I have never found School for Scandal a particularly appealing play; it lacks the warmth and physicality of Sheridan's first play, Rivals, and in its casual, throwaway anti-Semitism, it epitomizes much that is repugnant about late eighteenth-century British culture. It is, moreover, a poorly, or at least a very loosely, constructed play, with two separate plots clumsily grafted together--that of the Teazles or Slanderers and that of the Surface brothers. Theater historians praise Sheridan for working so closely with his Drury Lane Company and adapting parts to the apparently limited talents at his disposal, (1) though this is hardly a feature that endures over time. And finally, not surprisingly, this is not a play that has attracted particularly interesting commentary, which consists too often of old school praise of witty dialogue as a throwback to Restoration comedy. (2) I don't propose to offer a bold new reading that will either resolve the divisions or rehabilitate Sheridan's play, but I would like to suggest a generic reconsideration. We understand the long eighteenth century as a period of unusual generic instability and experimentation. Our attention tends to be absorbed by the emergence and normalization of the novel, but there is also considerable generic flux, albeit without the appearance of new forms, in the playhouse as well. Just to pick some obvious examples, we have self-defined tragedies such as Congreve's Mourning Bride, that end with prosperous protagonists, just as we have self-described comedies that end with their protagonists miserable, such as Otway's Friendship in Fashion. Satire and comedy are terms that appear to be used interchangeably on the title pages of plays throughout the period. And while this does not exactly constitute legitimate historical evidence, the bewildering range of categories and subcategories that J. Douglas Canfield used in his anthology of Restoration and eighteenth-century drama indicates the grievous difficulty we have in making sense out of the types of these plays. (3) Nowhere are generic classifications more vexed than with sentimental comedy and its aftermath, a body of serious comedies that quite self-consciously exhibit many of the characteristics of tragedy. In short, Aristotle is of no help in understanding eighteenth-century British drama. In the standard histories of drama, Oliver Goldsmith's 1772 Essay On Theatre; Or, A Comparison Between Laughing And Sentimental Comedy has come to function as that libratory modernization text that delivers us from the mess of early modern generic indistinction, driving a stake through the heart of sentimental comedy and restoring the power of aggression and the pleasures of ridicule to comedy: The principal question therefore is whether, in describing low or middle life, an exhibition of its follies be not preferable to a detail of its calamities?.... [A]s tragedy displays the calamities of the great, so comedy should excite our laughter, by ridiculously exhibiting the follies of the lower part of mankind. (4) I want to read Sheridan's 1777 School for Scandal as a text marked by parallels to Goldsmith's Essay, for it too repeatedly, even obsessively asks in scene after scene, line after line, What's funny? What is the relation between comedy and ridicule, comedy and aggression? Given the nature of much late eighteenth-century literature from Frances Burney's Witlings to Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, it is not surprising that most readings of Sheridan's play find their resolution in the domestic portions of the plot--those elements that formally repudiate the public sphere and its addiction to gossip, slander, and aggressive competition. …

Monitored Speech: The "Equivalence" Relation between Direct and Indirect Speech in Jane Austen and James Joyce

In Aspects of the Novel, E.M Forster makes a distinction between round and flat characters that has achieved a certain celebrity. One reason for its celebrity is that it offers a plausible explanation for what might otherwise be inexplicable: the reader's tendency to give the benefit of the doubt to an otherwise very doubtful character, the indolent Lady Bertram in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. The passage in which Forster suggests Lady Bertram is transformed from a flat into a round character is ex plicable, however, in terms other than those the English novelist proposes. Indeed, this alternative explanation is preferable because it throws valuable light on an aspect of novelistic discourse that has remained remarkably undeveloped: the 'equiva lence' relation that exists between direct and indirect speech (Leech and Short 320). In this essay, my intention is to demonstrate that the passage cited by Forster as part of his argument for the existence of flat and round characters demonstrates one half of a significant rhetorical strategy: the narrator's deliberate upgrading or rhetorical amelioration of the impact of a character's words. I intend to show that this upgrad ing effect is matched, not least in Jane Austen herself, by the very opposite rhetorical effect, that of a deliberate downgrading or parodying of a particular character's re ported speech?something that Forster explicitly denies is part of Austen's reper toire. As a result of the analysis, I draw the conclusion that Forster's focus on rotundity is in fact a misreading of the real significance of the passage about Lady

The Politics of Silence: Mansfield Park and the Amelioration of Slavery

Research Article| November 01 2006 The Politics of Silence: Mansfield Park and the Amelioration of Slavery GEORGE E. BOULUKOS GEORGE E. BOULUKOS Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Novel (2006) 39 (3): 361–383. https://doi.org/10.1215/ddnov.039030361 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation GEORGE E. BOULUKOS; The Politics of Silence: Mansfield Park and the Amelioration of Slavery. Novel 1 November 2006; 39 (3): 361–383. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/ddnov.039030361 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsNovel Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © Novel Corp. 20062006 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Harriet Martineau's Writings on the British Empire (review)

Reviewed by: Harriet Martineau's Writings on the British Empire Maria Frawley (bio) Deborah Logan , ed. Harriet Martineau's Writings on the British Empire (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2004). Five volumes, c. 2000 pp., $675.00, cloth. This edition of Harriet Martineau's writings on the British empire could not have come at a more opportune time. Thanks in part to the influence of postcolonial criticism and theory in humanities programs, scholars of nineteenth-century literature, history, and culture have engaged for a decade or two in discussion of the origins, experience, and implications of British imperialism. For Victorianists working in English Departments, scholarship by Benedict Anderson, Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak has been particularly influential in creating awareness of how texts represent and deploy nationality, racial and ethnic difference, cultural authority, and how texts can be said to produce colonial knowledge. Yet given the reach and extent of the Empire by the end of the century, and the widespread assumption of British superiority that accompanied imperialism's more tangible manifestations, it is striking how relatively restricted is the canon of texts that literary scholars in particular have used to study its reverberations, particularly in the early and middle parts of the century. For this period, English students now routinely draw their evidence for an understanding of empire from a handful of novels, Austen's Mansfield Park, Brontë's Jane Eyre, and Gaskell's Cranford among them, and come to rather predictable conclusions about their orientalist assumptions. Only very recently have the limitations in our understanding of imperialism, and its presence in the literature of the period, surfaced for open and healthy discussion. Inspired in part by Bernard Porter's new book, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain (Oxford, 2004) – both by his overarching argument against a pervasive, monolithic "imperial culture" and by his claim that not a single canonical novel of the nineteenth century features the Empire significantly – Victorianists have been prompted to reflect more critically not only on imperialism itself, but on imperial historiography. That Harriet Martineau had something to say about these matters will come as no surprise to Martineau scholars, long aware of the formidable range of her writing. What the Pickering Masters series has achieved, [End Page 69] though, is to group texts until now considered disparate into a unified whole that demonstrates the breadth and depth of Martineau's investment in the social, economic, and historic consequences of her country's imperial posture. Thus, Volume One includes a selection of texts originally published in Martineau's influential series Illustrations of Political Economy, as well as the 1845 tale Dawn Island. Volumes Two and Three comprise the long out-of-print travel volume and historical study, Eastern Life, Present and Past. Volume Four brings together Martineau's writings on Ireland, which stretch from Ireland, published in 1832, to Letters from Ireland (1852), to her study on the Endowed Schools of Ireland (1858). Finally, Volume 5 includes a selection of texts that address more wellknown dimensions of Britain's imperial presence: British Rule in India: A Historical Sketch (1857); Suggestions Toward the Future Government of India (1858); The East India Company Question (1857–58); and The China Question (1857–58). Although acknowledging the gaps between Martineau's stated ideals, which in many respects mimicked those of imperial administrators, and the realities of military might and economic exploitation, Patrick Brantlinger remarks in his preface to the series that "Martineau expresses 'liberal imperialism' at its best: conscientious, free of racism, clear about cultural differences, and with progress in civilization throughout the world as the ultimate goal" (1:x). Alike attuned to the fact that Martineau was "always eclectic" and "not without contradictions" in her ongoing attempt to reconcile imperialism with democratic principles (1:xlvi), Deborah Logan proves a steady and eminently capable guide through each of the five volumes in this series. Her general introduction stresses from the outset the connections between the spread of imperialism and the growth of the periodical press, which facilitated the circulation of travel writing, sociology, and political economy – genres that Martineau cultivated throughout her journalistic career. She emphasizes as well the importance of recognizing the many ways...

Lot's daughters: sex, redemption, and women's quest for authority

Table of Contents for Lot's Daughters Preface Acknowledgments 1. Introduction: The Lot Complex PART I: THE HERITAGE OF LOT AND HIS DAUGHTERS 2. Telling Examples: The Growing Authority of Lot's Daughters 3. Faithful Interpretations: Lot and His Daughters from the Bible to the Reformation 4. A Family Museum: Visions of Lot and His Daughters 5. Embracing the Daughter: The Riddle of Lot, Shakespeare, and the English Heritage PART II: GENERATING AND REPRESENTING MODERN DAUGHTERS OF LOT 6. Reflections from the Cave: Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and Mary Shelley's Mathilda 7. The Cave and the Mask: The BrontAs 8. The Maiden Tribute: Lot's Daughters Through the Victorian Looking-Glass 9. The Lot of Freud and Dora 10. Shirley Temple: The Daughter as Childstar 11. Woody Allen and Mia Farrow: Lot in the Era of Deconstruction PART III: LOT'S DAUGHTERS AT THE MILLENNIUM: POTOMAC TESTAMENTS 12. Complete Darkness: Carolivia Herron and Thereafter Johnnie 13. The Impeachment of Lot: The Clintons, Lewinsky, and Tripp Notes Index

Submission, inhibition and sexuality: Masochistic character and psychic change in Austen's Mansfield Park

Mansfield Park is Austen's most controversial novel. ‘Squarely taking on such issues as class, gender, sexuality, religion, education, theatricality, and colonialism, Mansfield Park now appears to occupy a more critical place in Austen's canon and in literary and cultural history generally than that perennial favorite, Pride and prejudice’ (Johnson, 1998, p. xiii). Austen's heroine, Fanny Price has generated heated controversy because of the provocative contradictions in her character, which this paper argues tally with the psychoanalytic understanding of moral masochism within the masochistic character. As a child neglected at home and then sent to a frightening new environment, in which she was lowest and last, Fanny Price needed the love and protection even of those who mistreated her. She needed to control and influence them with submission and the inhibition of her aggressive impulses and through a vigilant scrupulousness. Austen created a plot in which she also dramatized the seeds of change that lie within the submissive character, within the repressed and inhibited psychosexual desire linked to the father which can drive the reemergence of wishes for love and satisfaction in situations of relative safety.

The Touch of the Real: Essays in Early Modern Culture in Honour of Stephen Greenblatt (review)

Reviewed by: The Touch of the Real: Essays in Early Modern Culture in Honour of Stephen Greenblatt Craig Allan Horton Kelly, Philippa , ed., The Touch of the Real: Essays in Early Modern Culture in Honour of Stephen Greenblatt, Crawley, WA, University of Western Australia Press, 2002; paper; pp. xvii, 264; 10 b/w illustrations; RRP AUD$38.95; ISBN 1876268727. This collection of essays has a distinctly local flavour with all eleven contributors (apart from Greenblatt himself) being Australian-based. The Introduction begins with an account of the largely acrimonious response to Barry Kosky's 1998 production of King Lear and moves immediately into detailing the Touch of the Real: Communing with the Living and the Dead symposium at Canberra's Humanities Research Centre from which this volume of essays emerged. The casting of these two concurrent events against what Kelly calls 'the intensely ambivalent relationship that contemporary Australians have with Shakespeare' (p. ix) may lead the reader to expect a rehash of familiar 'colonial' perspectives on Shakespeare. Yet, the subject matter here is broader and more rewarding, focussing on a multiplicity of early modern writers and always conversant with the ideas of Stephen Greenblatt. The collection seeks to cover three broad areas of early modern cultural studies – canon formation, the complexity of identity and the opening of new worlds. The opening essay by Greenblatt is a proper example of new historicist theory, reading Shakespeare via Austen's Mansfield Park as a springboard to discuss the more general status of Shakespeare's canon as England's 'substitute' constitution. The point here is the waning centrality of canonical English works in the more general appellation of English Literature which, in universities, are 'now being taught alongside a range of new figures, Salman Rushdie for example, or Wole Soyinka, Toni Morrison, or Derek Walcott' (p. 7). The message here seems to be that literary history is less about establishing a narrative of continuity and organicism, conveyed through a few select works, but about moments of unforeseeable rupture and shift, as reflected in the constant change of the English language itself. [End Page 246] Still the question remains, why is a book of historicist essays on early modern culture so narrowly focused on Shakespeare? Peter Holbrook supplies an interesting and mostly satisfying answer in his essay 'Shakespeare at the birth of Historicism'. Dating the birth of modern historicism to eighteenth-century Germany, and particularly to the work of Herder, Holbrook identifies the concurrent appropriation of Shakespeare by German Romantics as an affront to the neo-classicism of Napoleonic French cultural imperialism. In short, Holbrook wants to show that the connection between historicism and Shakespeare is more than accidental. It derives from the appropriation of Shakespeare as a medium through which to express the virtues of historicist readings, as well as the fact that there is 'something genuinely historicist in Shakespeare's texts' (p. 27). Lee Scott Taylor's essay deals with another vital area of historicist study – appropriation and representation of Shakespeare on film. The essay is interesting in showing how we can discuss Shakespeare in a way that bypasses stage performance almost entirely in order to consider the internal conflict between the aesthetics of history and actual history. The contentious representation of Richard III in Shakespeare's play represents a reliable starting point for such discussions, and works particularly well here in relation to the 1995 film starring Ian McKellen as its aesthetic is a complex mix of Mosley's fascist movement in Britain and Nazism. Taylor is essentially arguing that history and aestheticism are not necessarily separate phenomena, but intertwined and Shakespeare's Richard III is a wonderful example, especially when transferred to film. Taylor reminds us that the plays are actively involved in 'making history', rather than simply reporting it. Part One of the collection is rounded off with essays by Ron Bedford on the uses of irony in Milton and Bob White's study of 'Humanisms Old and New'. Bedford's essay points to a theoretical impasse for historicism, when dealing with abstract principles such as irony – in short the history and 'ownership' of irony at the point of usage, both of which are layered, continually obscured and indistinct...

I'll tell you what: the life of Elizabeth Inchbald

Elizabeth Simpson Inchbald (1753-1821) was one of the leading literary figures of the late eighteenth century - an actress, a successful play-wright and editor of several collections of plays, a popular novelist, and a drama critic. Considered a beautiful, independent woman, Inchbald was much involved in the theatrical, literary, and publishing life of London. Elizabeth Simpson ran away from home at age eighteen to seek fame as an actress in London and quickly married Joseph Inchbald, an actor twice her age. They toured the stage together until his sudden death in 1779. She made her London stage debut a year later, and her writing debut came in 1784 with the play The Mogul Tale; Or, The Descent of the Balloon. Over the next two decades she wrote or adapted twenty-one plays: comedies, farces, and works from French and German, including the version of Kotzebue's Lovers' Vows, later used in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. Inchbald's acclaimed first novel, A Simple Story, prefigured the work of later women writers such as Austen. Using material from Inchbald's own pocket books detailing her daily life (she destroyed most of her letters and journals late in her life at the advice of her Catholic confessor) as well as a wealth of other sources, Annibel Jenkins tells for the first time not only the full story of Mrs. Inchbald's life but also provides a fascinating look at the society and politics, both public and private, of London in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Nature, Animals, and Gender in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and Emma

(2002). Nature, Animals, and Gender in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and Emma. Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory: Vol. 13, No. 4, pp. 269-285.