Jane Austen and Her Legacy

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This unit offers a close examination of Jane Austen's major novels and analyses the profound influence she has had on contemporary culture. We try to account for why television and cinematic adaptations, and fan-fiction reinventions and mashups of her work continue to appear at a prolific rate. The unit begins by situating Austen as a novelist writing in a particular historical era at the turn of the nineteenth century, with Britain rapidly emerging as one of Europe's foremost maritime and imperial powers. Austen is writing at a time, in the wake of the French Revolution, in which the Enlightenment focus on the importance of reason, its suspicion of ecclesiastical authority, and the critique of custom and tradition was influential. At the same time Romanticism in poetry and literature focused on the role of passion and self-expression as distinct from conforming to existing literary conventions, with Lord Byron one of the celebrated poets of his age. Writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Austen was also well aware that the emerging novel form was inspiring lively discussions of its moral and educative effects on a growing, substantially female readership. While her novels have been celebrated down the ages as archetypal romances, the unit draws on recent scholarly debates in order to understand Austen's novels as invested in contributing to social and political conversations of her era. Students will study the ethics of Austen's novels which can be interpreted as promoting sociable virtues and as extolling companionate marriage in a period in which sharply defined gender roles, sanctioned by law, generated inequalities and misunderstanding between the sexes. Throughout the unit, by studying prominent film adaptations of her novels, students can examine Austen's extraordinary influence on popular culture including our conception of romance, and why Austen proves to be a continuing source of fascination for contemporary storytellers.