Jane Austen, early and late / Freya Johnston.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Johnston, Freya, author.

Contributor:

Alumni and Friends Memorial Book Fund.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Austen, Jane, 1775-1817--Criticism and interpretation.

Austen, Jane.

Austen, Jane, 1775-1817.

Criticism and interpretation.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

xiv, 271 pages : illustrations (black and white) ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2021]

Summary:

"Jane Austen's six novels, published toward the end of her short life, represent a body of work that is as brilliant as it is compact. Her earlier writings have routinely been dismissed as mere juvenilia, or stepping stones to mature proficiency and greatness. Austen's first biographer described them as "childish effusions." Was he right to do so? Can the novels be definitively separated from the unpublished works? In Jane Austen, Early and Late, Freya Johnston argues that they cannot. Examining the three manuscript volumes in which Austen collected her earliest writings, Johnston finds that Austen's regard and affection for them are revealed by her continuing to revisit and revise them throughout her adult life. The teenage works share the milieu and the humour of the novels, while revealing more clearly the sources and influences upon which Austen drew. Johnston upends the conventional narrative, according to which Austen discarded the satire and fantasy of her first writings in favour of the irony and realism of the novels. By demonstrating a stylistic and thematic continuity across the full range of Austen's work, Johnston asks whether it makes sense to speak of an early and a late Austen at all."-- Publisher website.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: 1. Developing

2. Effusions of Fancy

3. Reading and Repeating

4. Dying with Laughter

5. Histories

6. The Village and the Universe.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 249-263) and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Alumni and Friends Memorial Book Fund.

ISBN:

9780691198002

0691198004

OCLC:

1240576074