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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

From "Pictures Of Perfection" To "No Ideal Expression": How Jane Austen Reimagines And Reinvents Eighteenth-Century Heroines, Gretchen Picklesimer Kinney Mar 2024

From "Pictures Of Perfection" To "No Ideal Expression": How Jane Austen Reimagines And Reinvents Eighteenth-Century Heroines, Gretchen Picklesimer Kinney

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.


“Perfect In Her Eyes:” Domestic Retrenchment And Panoptical Resistance In Jane Austen’S Mansfield Park, Holden O. D'Evegnee Aug 2023

“Perfect In Her Eyes:” Domestic Retrenchment And Panoptical Resistance In Jane Austen’S Mansfield Park, Holden O. D'Evegnee

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Mansfield Park features one of Jane Austen's most unique heroines, Fanny Price. Though Fanny is painfully shy—almost to the point of becoming the audience to her own story—she manages, by the end of the novel, to gain everything she wanted while the rest of her adopted family falls apart into disgrace or reform. Some critics see this as proof of Fanny’s monstrosity while others read Fanny’s ascent as a reward for her principled nature. Using recent postcolonial readings of Mansfield Park with Michel Foucault’s theory of panoptical surveillance, my goal is to show how Fanny Price subverts the colonial authority …


Women After Waterloo: Evolving Females In Jane Austen’S Persuasion, Madison Maloney Aug 2023

Women After Waterloo: Evolving Females In Jane Austen’S Persuasion, Madison Maloney

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

In Jane Austen’s last novel, Persuasion, she offers a glimpse into a character that breaks past the societal restraints women typically experience. Mrs. Croft, ostensibly, is the first Austen woman to find her way out of England; the Napoleon wars afford her the opportunity to travel the seas with her Admiral husband and participate in traditionally masculine experiences. Though other women in Austen novels do travel, they remain in-country, and they always find their way back to their original society. Throughout many wars in history, the absence of men as they fight in the military offers women the opportunity to …


Perceived Preceptor: Narrator's Role In Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, Jason Godfrey Dec 2017

Perceived Preceptor: Narrator's Role In Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, Jason Godfrey

Faculty Publications

In this article, I posit that Austen uses her self-aware, colloquial narrator to satirize Catherine’s grandiose fantasies and quiz (or mock) the reader who would prefer a story where fantasies are indulged and also to instruct the reader about the importance of discernment both in-text and in larger social discourse.


From Epistolary Form To Embedded Narratological Device: Embedded Epistles In Austen And Scott, Tonja S. Vincent Jun 2016

From Epistolary Form To Embedded Narratological Device: Embedded Epistles In Austen And Scott, Tonja S. Vincent

Theses and Dissertations

The perception that the epistolary form was rejected by novelists during the Romantic Era has largely been accepted by scholars. However, in looking at the period's two most prominent authors, Walter Scott and Jane Austen, we see that the epistolary form remained vibrant long after its supposed demise. Throughout their careers, both Austen and Scott employed embedded letters as a tool to create authenticity. Both Austen and Scott use what I call "literary letters" to create a sense of realism in their novels that contributed to the rise of the novel. Scholars often claim that Austen eschewed the epistolary form …


Companionate And Pedagogic Marriage Models In Jane Austen's Sense And Sensibility And Emma, Kandace Hansen Wheelwright Mar 2015

Companionate And Pedagogic Marriage Models In Jane Austen's Sense And Sensibility And Emma, Kandace Hansen Wheelwright

Theses and Dissertations

Jane Austen, seen by some as the mother of all chick-lit, is synonymous with tales of love and marriage. Generally, scholars have classified the types of marriages Austen writes about as either companionate (a marriage based on love) or pedagogic (a marriage based on an older man training a younger woman to be his ideal wife). In comparing the companionate and pedagogic marriage models in Austen's Sense and Sensibility and Emma, however, one finds that these traditional definitions and classifications of the companionate and pedagogic marriages prove to be complicated. The companionate marriage is not only a marriage based on …


The Enlightenment Tradition Of Hume And Smith In Austen: Windows To Understanding, Nicole Coonradt Jan 2012

The Enlightenment Tradition Of Hume And Smith In Austen: Windows To Understanding, Nicole Coonradt

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

In his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Adam Smith notes the importance of "little department[s]"-those smaller circles of social contact: "By Nature the events which immediately affect that little department in which we ourselves have some little management and directions, which immediately affect ourselves, our friends, our country, are the events which interest us the most, and which chiefly excite our desires and aversions, our hopes and fears, our joys and sorrows:' Alasdair MacIntyre would agree with this idea of one's sphere of influence, especially in the works of Jane Austen. Clearly, this concern with self, others, and country might …


The "Crafting" Of Austen: Handicraft, Arts And Crafts, And The Reception Of Austen During The Victorian Period, Natalie Quinn Mar 2011

The "Crafting" Of Austen: Handicraft, Arts And Crafts, And The Reception Of Austen During The Victorian Period, Natalie Quinn

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis addresses the significant but often overlooked relationship between Jane Austen's works and the body of criticism about them and the two major craft movements of the nineteenth century: the Handicraft Movement and the Arts and Crafts Movement. The connections occur at two important moments during that century—first, at the moment of Austen's career during the Regency/Romantic period, and second, at the Victorian moment of the years surrounding the 1869 publication of James Edward Austen-Leigh's Memoir about Austen. In both of these moments, critics and reviewers repeatedly respond to Austen's life and works by using craft-related diction. This diction …


Merit Beyond Any Already Published: Austen And Authorship In The Romantic Age, Rebecca Lee Jensen Ogden Nov 2010

Merit Beyond Any Already Published: Austen And Authorship In The Romantic Age, Rebecca Lee Jensen Ogden

Theses and Dissertations

In recent decades there have been many attempts to pull Austen into the fold of high Romantic literature. On one level, these thematic comparisons are useful, for Austen has long been anachronistically treated as separate from the Romantic tradition. In the past, her writings have essentially straddled Romantic classification, labeled either as hangers-on in the satiric eighteenth-century literary tradition or as early artifacts of a kind of proto-Victorianism. To a large extent, scholars have described Austen as a writer departing from, rather than embracing, the literary trends of the Romantic era. Yet, while recent publications depicting a “Romantic Austen” yield …


Women Mourners, Mourning "Nobody", Jennifer Pecora Jun 2010

Women Mourners, Mourning "Nobody", Jennifer Pecora

Theses and Dissertations

Historian David Bell recently suggested that scholars reconsider the impact of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815) upon modern culture, naming them the first "total war" in modern history. My thesis explores the significance of the wars specifically in the British mourning culture of the period by studying the war literature of four women writers: Anna Letitia Barbauld, Amelia Opie, Jane Austen, and Felicia Hemans. This paper further asks how these authors contributed to the development of a national consciousness studied by Georg Lukács, Benedict Anderson, and others. I argue that women had a representative experience of non-combatants' struggle to …


In Defense Of Ugly Women, Sara Deborah Nyffenegger Jul 2007

In Defense Of Ugly Women, Sara Deborah Nyffenegger

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis explores why beauty became so much more important in nineteenth-century Britain, especially for marriageable young women in the upper and middle class. My argument addresses the consequences of that change in the status of beauty for plain or ugly women, how this social shift is reflected in the novel, and how authors respond to the issue of plainer women and issues of their marriageability. I look at how these authorial attitudes shifted over the century, observing that the issue of plain women and their marriageability was dramatized by nineteenth-century authors, whose efforts to heighten the audience's awareness of …