Romantic Austen Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon

A full-length scholarly monograph examining Jane Austen's writings within the traditions of Romanticism. It argues that Austen's central position within the literary canon can only be fully understood by locating her work within Romantic cultural traditions. Taking the contemporary Austen revival as its cue, the study presents a series of historically contextualized readings of Austen's juvenilia (Catharine, or The Bower and The History of England), Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park and Austen's posthumously published novel, Sanditon, to examine ways in which Romantic-period definitions of nation, culture and literature continue to function in contemporary readings of Austen and her period. An investigation of the sexual politics of national culture, heritage culture and literary canon-formation informs the study's discussion of the relationship between Romanticism, Austen and the literary canon.

List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; Note on texts used; Introduction. The 'fall into a quotation': tracking the canonical, Romantic and post-Romantic Austen; 1. Aunt Jane's 'early workings' and 'betweenities': closet dramas of literary apprenticeship; 2. Sensibility, free indirect style and the Romantic technology of discretion; 3. Breeding heritage culture: Mansfield Park, Reflections on the Revolution in France and the glorious revolutions of the country house; 4. Austen's Romantic fragment: Sanditon and the sexual politics of land speculation; Epilogue; Notes; Select bibliography; Index.

Tuite's study presents a series of historically contextualized readings of Austen's writing, including juvenilia, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park and Austen's posthumously published novel, Sanditon, to examine ways in which Romantic-period definitions of nation, culture and literature continue to function in contemporary readings of Austen and her period.

Clara Tuite is a Lecturer in English at the University of Melbourne. She is an associate editor of The Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture 1776-1832 (1999). She has published articles on Gothic literature in Eighteenth-Century Life and Romanticism on the Net.