Arts and Humanities | Open Access Articles | Digital Commons Network™

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 …

Go to article

The Enduring Austen Heroine: Self-Awareness And Moral Maturity In Jane Austen's Emma And In Modern Austen Fan-Fiction, Brittany A. Meng Nov 2010

The Enduring Austen Heroine: Self-Awareness And Moral Maturity In Jane Austen's Emma And In Modern Austen Fan-Fiction, Brittany A. Meng

Masters Theses

Jane Austen's novels continue to be popular in the twenty-first century because her heroines are both delightful and instructive; they can be viewed as role models of personal growth due to their honest self-examination and commitment to high moral standards. Chapter one establishes the patterns of personal growth that uniquely characterizes Austen's heroines in each of her six novels. Chapter two tests these conclusions by carefully examining the character of Emma Woodhouse. Though Emma is a unique heroine due to her wealth and social privileges, she follows the principles of personal growth possessed by Austen's other heroines. Chapter three further …

Go to article

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 …

Go to article

Sisterhood Articulates A New Definition Of Moral Female Identity: Jane Austen's Adaptation Of The Eighteenth-Century Tradition, Katherine Curtis Jan 2010

Sisterhood Articulates A New Definition Of Moral Female Identity: Jane Austen's Adaptation Of The Eighteenth-Century Tradition, Katherine Curtis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Writing at a moment of ideological crisis between individualism and hierarchical society, Jane Austen asserts a definition of moral behavior and female identity that mediates the two value systems. I argue that Austen most effectively articulates her belief in women's moral autonomy and social responsibility in her novels through her portrayal of sisterhood. Austen reshapes the stereotype of sisters and female friendships as dangerous found in her domestic novel predecessors. While recognizing women's social vulnerability, which endangers female friendship and turns it into a site of competition, Austen urges the morality of selflessly embracing sisterhood anyway. An Austen heroine must …

Go to article

The Mutual Development In James, Henry, And Jane Austen's Early Writings, Margaret K. Antone Jan 2010

The Mutual Development In James, Henry, And Jane Austen's Early Writings, Margaret K. Antone

ETD Archive

Critics have long debated over whether or not Jane Austen contributed to her brother's literary periodical The Loiterer, specifically with the Sophia Sentiment letter. Observing Jane Austen's early writings in her juvenilia and Northanger Abbey, strong similarities are found in the writing styles of Jane, Henry, and James Austen. Taking into consideration the close relationship of the Austen siblings, this paper examines the recurring themes and the similarity in Jane Austen's early writing style to that of her siblings' periodical and the strong likelihood that she did contribute to The Loiterer. This study also asserts that the style of Northanger …

Go to article

(De)Constructing Jane: Converting Austen In Film Responses, Karen Gevirtz Jan 2010