More from Targoff, discussing Hamlet’s relation to the differing views of worship in the Elizabethan period. Targoff complains that “what is strikingly, and mistakenly, absent from our accounts of the Elizabethan settlement is precisely what the play interrogates in staging . . . . Continue Reading »
England’s economy in Austen’s time was still dominated by land ownership. Land was the most settled and permanent form of wealth, and writers like Coleridge and Burke asserted that landownership formed a “natural” governing class that had a physical stake in the nation. In . . . . Continue Reading »
Many early novelists aimed at social reform. Were they successful? According to a 1870 reviewer of J.E. Austen-Leigh’s Memoir of Jane Austen , they were: “it is the increase of knowledge among the wealthier classes which has stimulated their sympathies for the the poorer, and, in the . . . . Continue Reading »
With his usual critical insight, Auden captured Austen’s knowingness in a poem about Byron: You could not shock her more than she shocks me; Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass. It makes me most uncomfortable to see An English spinster of the middle class Describe the amorous effects of . . . . Continue Reading »
William Deresiewicz of Columbia wrote a 1997 article in an issue of English Literary History that illuminates the issues in Pride and Prejudice very nicely. He starts at the beginning: Unlike other novels, Austen opens Pride and Prejudice not with the name and circumstances of the heroine, but with . . . . Continue Reading »
Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is often interpreted by linking the principal characters with the two flaws of the title. Darcy is “pride” and Elizabeth “prejudice.” This way of reading the book gets at some important themes, but it doesn’t quite get at the crux of . . . . Continue Reading »
An old essay by Edd Winfield Parks explores the question of how Austen gets us to move on to the next chapter. She doesn’t, he points out, use cliff-hanger chapter endings, like a John Grisham novel. What keeps us reading? The question becomes more pointed when we notice that Austen often . . . . Continue Reading »
PD James, who knows whereof she speaks, once remarked, “I think if Jane Austen were writing today, she might very well be our greatest mystery novelists.” . . . . Continue Reading »
What is going on in Samuel Richardson’s fiction that can shape such diverse offspring as Rousseau, the Marquis de Sade, and Jane Austen (who loved Sir Charles Grandison )? . . . . Continue Reading »
Auden distinguished Christian and pagan tragedy: “Greek tragedy is the tragedy of necessity, i.e., the felling aroused in the spectators is ‘What a pity it had to be this way’: Christian tragedy is the tragedy of possibility, ‘What a pity it was this way when it might have . . . . Continue Reading »
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