Jane Austen and Literary Theory

Description

Jane Austen was one of the most adventurous thinkers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but one would probably never guess that by reading her critics. Perhaps no canonical author in English literature has proven, until now, more resistant to theory. Tracing the political motives for this resistance, Jane Austen and Literary Theory proceeds to counteract it. The book’s detailed interpretations guide readers through some of the important intellectual achievements of Austen’s career―from the stunning teenage parodies "Evelyn" and "The History of England" to her most accomplished novels, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma. While criticism has largely been content to describe the various ways Austen was a product of her time, Jane Austen and Literary Theory reveals how she anticipated the ideas of formidable literary thinkers of the twentieth century, especially Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. Gift and exchange, speech and writing, symbol and allegory, stable irony and Romantic irony―these are just a few of the binary oppositions her dazzling texts deconstruct. Although her novels are major achievements of nineteenth-century realism, critics have hitherto underestimated their rhetorical cunning and their fascination with the materiality of language. Doing justice to Austen’s language requires critical methods as ruthless as her irony, and Jane Austen and Literary Theory supplies these methods. This book will enable both her devotees and her detractors to appreciate her genius in unusual ways. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Table of Contents Acknowledgements Introduction: Literary Theory and Austen Criticism 1. “Evelyn” and the Impossibility of the Gift “Evelyn” and Derridean Gift Theory Literary Language and the Contradictions of the Gift Austen, Derrida, and Capitalism 2. Speech, Writing, and Allegory in Pride and Prejudice Phonocentrism: From Derrida to the Eighteenth Century and Beyond Phonocentrism in Pride and Prejudice Writing’s Rehabilitation Dancing about Arche-Writing 3. Allegory, Symbol, and Irony in Mansfield Park Austen, Coleridge, Burke The Fall of Symbol and the Rise of Allegory Between Allegory and Irony: The Last Chapter Between Allegory and Symbol: Lovers’ Vows 4. Emma’s Parergonal Realism Kant, Derrida, and the Parergon Emma’s “Schemes in the In-Betweens” Parergonal Lack Parergonal Verse/Parergonal Prose Confronting Front Matter Sex and Citationality Emma’s Headers and Footers Horrors of Finery Framing “Nothing” 5. Austen’s Unromantic Romantic Ironies From Comic to (German) Romantic Irony Theorizing Parabasis: Fichte, Schlegel, and de Man Parabasis of Parabasis in Emma Tracing Austen’s Irony: “The History of England” Closing the Ironic Opening of Pride and Prejudice Mr. Bennet: Being Ironic Irony and the Sublime Index