Reading Jane Austen

Lively and engaging account of the experience of reading Jane Austen, by leading scholar and novelist.

Jenny Davidson (Author)

9781108431835, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 7 December 2017

172 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 0.9 cm, 0.29 kg

'Reading Jane Austen offers a useful guide through the intricacies of Austen's works and world for undergraduate students and meticulous Austen fans; a quick, smart, satisfying read for Austen scholars; and nuanced musings on the nature and function of novel reading for all. For that audience, Reading Jane Austen provides comprehensive historical contextualization of Austen's writing in terms of social practices and ideologies, deploying biographical information about Austen as well as analogies to our own time.' Jodi L. Wyett, Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Whether you're new to Austen's work or know it backwards and forwards already, this book provides a clear, full and highly engaging account of how Austen's fiction works and why it matters. Exploring new pathways into the study of Jane Austen's writing, novelist and academic Jenny Davidson looks at Austen's work through a writer's lens, addressing formal questions about narration, novel writing, and fictional composition as well as themes including social and women's history, morals and manners. Introducing new readers to the breadth and depth of Jane Austen's writing, and offering new insights to those more familiar with Austen's work, Jenny Davidson celebrates the art and skill of one of the most popular and influential writers in the history of English literature.

1. Letters
2. Conversation
3. Revision
4. Manners
5. Morals
6. Voice
7. Female economies.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: general [DSB]