Activity: Talk or presentation types › Invited talk
Description
Jane Austen wrote courtship novels: this is a truth universally acknowledged, or perhaps an assumption universally unchallenged. But are they? There are courtships in the novels, but are they in any overarching sense primarily “about” courtship, or is the form of the comic novel just the mould into which Austen pours a more complex and shifting amalgam of love story, bildungsroman, satire and parody, all the time subverting the insistent masculine gaze. In this paper I will explore the senses in which the novels are and are not about courtship, and touch upon the effects this persistent belief has on her reputation and reception in the twenty-first century.