"Jane Austen and her World"
November 1, 2024
9a - 2:30p
Lynn Festa, Associate Professor, Department of English, Rutgers University
Why are there so many soldiers stationed in the seemingly sleepy provincial towns where the novels of Jane Austen are so often set? Jane Austen may conjure up images of a circumscribed world of country towns, flowing dresses and decorous manners, but she lived at a moment of immense historical turmoil, marked by famine, political repression, civic tumult at home, and slavery, revolution, and the Napoleonic Wars abroad. Focusing on Pride and Prejudice, this session will address both Austen's formal contributions to the novel?above all, her development of free indirect discourse-- and the historical and cultural contexts out of which her writings emerged. We will draw on a broad range of materials, including vindications of the rights of man (and woman!), debates on the slave trade, reports on the Revolutions in France and Haiti, and satiric prints as well as images of a seemingly tranquil British countryside by Gainsborough and depictions of the devastation of war by Goya. Together we will paint a picture of the world Jane Austen inhabited and of the relationships her novels establish to the greater world beyond her immediate grasp. What is at stake in the decision to represent? or to block out? historical events happening elsewhere in the world?
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