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Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities

The Edinburgh Companion to Jane Austen and the Arts

Edited by Joe Bray and Hannah Moss

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£155.00

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About this book

Examines Jane Austen’s engagement with the broad range of artistic practices featured in her work
  • Presents authoritative critical assessments, based on original research, of the representation of a broad range of artistic practice in the work of Jane Austen
  • Includes insightful and provocative readings of how Austen’s writing has been adapted and transposed across media, including film, television, theatre and online environments
  • Considers Austen’s investigation of the arts in its full historical, philosophical and aesthetic context
  • Comprises thirty-three specially commissioned chapters on Austen and the arts from well-established and emerging scholars from multiple academic disciplines

Jane Austen was a keen consumer of the arts throughout her lifetime. The Edinburgh Companion to Jane Austen and the Arts considers how Austen represents the arts in her writing, from her juvenilia to her mature novels. The thirty-three original chapters in this Companion cover the full range of Austen’s engagement with the arts, including the silhouette and the caricature, crafts, theatre, fashion, music and dance, together with the artistic potential of both interior and exterior spaces. This volume also explores her artistic afterlives in creative re-imaginings across different media, including adaptations and transpositions in film, television, theatre, digital platforms and games.

Reviews

This is an ambitious, comprehensive, and thoughtfully curated book—itself a work of art.

At last, a volume that does justice to Jane Austen’s immersion in contemporary arts, and to the ways in which her cultural appetites shaped her novels.

This collection, edited by Bray (Univ. of Sheffield, UK) and Moss (independent scholar), offers a wide-ranging study of Jane Austen’s engagement with the arts. The volume is extensive, including 33 chapters from expert authors from a wide range of disciplines and over 100 illustrations. The volume features three parts: "The Arts in Context," "The Arts in Austen," and "Afterlives." The first two parts focus more specifically on contemporary aesthetics and the range of art in Austen’s work: e.g., caricature, crafts, fashion, music, dance, theatre, architecture, and gardening. Part 3 “considers Austen’s legacy through analysis of her afterlives in print, on stage and screen, and into the digital age.” Topics in this section include the publication of her letters, illustrated editions, translations, and adaptations on the page, stage, and screen. The volume also focuses throughout on three themes: Austen’s knowledge of contemporary aesthetics and artistic theories; her portrayal of skill in the arts as a “key index to character”; and her depiction of art as it relates to plot development. The diversity of topics and approaches provides a detailed and expansive interdisciplinary study of Austen and the arts.

Summing Up: Highly recommended.

Table of contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Note on Texts

Introduction, Joe Bray and Hannah Moss

Part I: The Arts in Context

1. Jane Austen, Early Modern Aesthetics and Contemplative Sublimity, Natasha Duquette

2. Taste and Passion, Disinterest and the Imagination, Tom Huhn

3. Jane Austen, Moral Philosophy and the Tradition, Kathryn E. Davis

4. ‘Possessing a most exquisite taste in every species of literature’: Reading, Moral Taste and Creative Action in Jane Austen’s Novels, Katie Halsey

5. Reforming the Artist Heroine: Reading Sense and Sensibility (1811) as a Response to Jane West’s A Gossip’s Story (1796), Hannah Moss

6. Picturing (In)Sensibility in Austen’s Novels and Print Culture, Inger Brodey

7. The Flemish Jane Austen, Clara Tuite

Part II: The Arts in Austen

8. ‘The Creative Eye of Fancy’: Women, Visual Culture and the Female Gaze in Austen’s Novels, Maureen McCue

9. Shadow Portraits: Jane Austen, Lady Susan and Silhouettes, Laura Engel

10. Jane Austen and Crafts, Jennie Batchelor

11. Jane Austen’s Conversation Pieces, Anne Toner

12. Jane Austen, Caricature and the Fat Self, Olivia Ferguson

13. Jane Austen and the Figure of the Body, Julia Banister

14. ‘He has great pleasure in seeing the performances of other people’: Austen’s Men and the Arts, Juliette Wells

15. Music in Jane Austen's Novels, Kathryn L. Libin

16. Jane Austen’s Dance Dialogues: Representing Dance in the Novels, Cheryl Wilson

17. The Paper Age: Jane Austen, Fashion and Finance, Leigh Wetherall Dickson

18. Jane Austen and the Theatre of Her Time, Angela Barlow

19. Jane Austen, Architecture and the Decorative Arts, Kristen Miller Zohn

20. Creators of Spaces: The Art of Owning, Inhabiting and Imagining Property in Jane Austen, Rita Dashwood

21. ‘Nothing but pleasure from beginning to end’: Austen’s Gardens, Stephen Bending

Part III: Afterlives

22. Jane Austen and the Letter, Catherine Delafield

23. Austen in a Competitive Literary Market Place: Nineteenth-century Illustrated Editions, Annika Bautz

24. Jane Austen and the Imperfect Art of Translation, Janine Barchas and Gillian Dow

25. Dealing With Jane Austen’s Unfinished Novels: Completions of The Watsons and Sanditon, Joanne Wilkes

26. The Perils of Novelistic Adaptation: Death Comes to Pemberley, Longbourn and Pamela, Joe Bray

27. When the Pen is in Fans’ Hands – The Jane Austen Fan Fiction Phenomenon, Maria Clara Pivato Biajoli

28. Locating Austen in Contemporary Theatre, Frances Babbage

29. ‘I am having a bit of a strange postmodern moment here’: Adapting Austen for Television, Lauren Nixon

30. Theme Parks and Seaside Resorts: Rethinking Material and Visual Culture in Sanditon (2019) and Austenland (2013), Madeleine Pelling

31. ‘Three or four families in a RPG’: Gaming and Jane Austen, Stephanie Russo

32. Austen Reloaded: Digital Approaches to Jane Austen and the Arts, Anthony Mandal

33. The Jane Austen Heritage Industry and Literary Tourism, Misty Krueger

Notes on Contributors

Index

About the contributors

Joe Bray

Joe Bray is Professor of Language and Literature at the University of Sheffield. He is the author of The Language of Jane Austen (2018), The Portrait in Fiction of the Romantic Period (2016), The Female Reader in the English Novel (2008) and The Epistolary Novel: Representations of Consciousness (2003), and co-editor of, amongst others, The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature (2012).

Hannah Moss

Hannah Moss works for the National Trust, having completed her PhD at the University of Sheffield. Her thesis, entitled ‘Sister Artists: The Artist Heroine in British Women’s Writing, 1760–1830’, explores how the woman artist is characterised in poetry and prose fiction of the period and she has published articles on the British reception of Germaine de Staël’s Corinne (1807), the role of the arts in the novels of Ann Radcliffe, and the paratextual framing of Felicia Hemans’ ekphrastic poem, ‘Properzia Rossi‘ (1828).

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