Jane Austen and Other Minds
Ordinary Language Philosophy in Literary Fiction

Jane Austen and Other Minds demonstrates how Austen's fiction is both philosophy and a resource to ordinary language philosophy.

Eric Reid Lindstrom (Author)

9781009206990, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 27 October 2022

294 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 2.2 cm, 0.6 kg

Jane Austen's fiction is itself philosophy, a fact to which Stanley Cavell attested when he honored his philosophical teacher, J. L. Austin, through homage to her and her work. Engaging equally in criticism and in philosophy, Jane Austen and Other Minds demonstrates the standing of Austen's fiction as a philosophical investigation, both in its own right and as a resource to ordinary language philosophy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Eric Reid Lindstrom addresses a long-standing shortcoming of Austen scholarship by locating in her fiction a linguistic phenomenology available to the novelistic everyday but not afforded her in intellectual history. He simultaneously advances recognition and understanding of J. L. Austin and Stanley Cavell, and of ordinary language philosophy, within Austen scholarship and the broader field of contemporary literary studies. This book argues compellingly for Cavell's choice of Austen as a means to pursue 'passionate exchange,' reimagining her common association with restriction and confinement.

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction. On Criticism and Other 'Middle Subjects'
1. Austen and Austin
2. Intelligible Community
3. Sense and Sensibility and Suffering
4. Pride and Prejudice and the Comedy of Perfectionism
5. Perlocutionary Entailments
6. Emma and Other Minds
7. Persuasion, Conviction, and Care: Jane Austen's Keeping
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary theory [DSA], Literature: history & criticism [DS]