Literary Criticism - General & Miscellaneous, Women Authors - British - Literary Criticism, English Fiction & Prose Literature - 19th Century - Literary Criticism, British History - Social Aspects, Enlightenment, British History - Pre-17th Century - Gener

Jane Austen and the Enlightenment

Name: Jane Austen and the Enlightenment
Author: Peter Knox-Shaw
ISBN: 9780521759977

by Peter Knox-Shaw

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Overview

Peter Knox-Shaw argues that Austen was a writer steeped in the Enlightenment, and that her allegiance to a sceptical tradition within it, shaped by figures such as Adam Smith and David Hume, lasted throughout her career. Know-Shaw draws on archival and other neglected sources to reconstruct the intellectual atmosphere of the Steventon Rectory where Austen wrote her juvenilia, and follows the course of her work through the 1790s and onwards, showing how minutely responsive it was to the may shifting movements of those turbulent years. Jane Austen and the Enlightenment is an important contribution to the study both of Jane Austen and of intellectual history at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Synopsis

It is now widely understood that Jane Austen's writing and thought were derived directly from her late eighteenth-century childhood, but astonishingly, this is the first study of the influence of the Enlightenment on Jane Austen. Drawing out the Enlightenment principles and ideas which lie behind much of Austen's writing, Peter Knox-Shaw presents a new perspective on the study of Austen's novels.

About the Author, Peter Knox-Shaw

Peter Knox-Shaw is a Research Associate at the University of Cape Town. He is author of The Explorer in English Fiction (1987) and has written about Jane Austen, British Romanticism, and representations of Africa.