Jane Austen was one of the most adventurous thinkers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but one would probably never guess that by reading her critics. Perhaps no canonical author in English literature has proven, until now, more resistant to theory. Tracing the political motives for this resistance, Jane Austen and Literary Theory proceeds to counteract it. The book’s detailed interpretations guide readers through some of the important intellectual achievements of Austen’s career—from the stunning teenage parodies "Evelyn" and "The History of England" to her most accomplished novels, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma. While criticism has largely been content to describe the various ways Austen was a product of her time, Jane Austen and Literary Theory reveals how she anticipated the ideas of formidable literary thinkers of the twentieth century, especially Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. Gift and exchange, speech and writing, symbol and allegory, stable irony and Romantic irony—these are just a few of the binary oppositions her dazzling texts deconstruct. Although her novels are major achievements of nineteenth-century realism, critics have hitherto underestimated their rhetorical cunning and their fascination with the materiality of language. Doing justice to Austen’s language requires critical methods as ruthless as her irony, and Jane Austen and Literary Theory supplies these methods. This book will enable both her devotees and her detractors to appreciate her genius in unusual ways.
Introduction: Literary Theory and Austen Criticism
Deconstruction, Francophobia, Austen
Austen, Historicism, Theory
Austen and the Play of the Signifier
Chapter 1: "Evelyn" and the Impossibility of the Gift
"Evelyn" and Derridean Gift Theory
Literary Language and the Contradictions of the Gift
Austen, Derrida, and Capitalism
Chapter 2: Speech, Writing, and Allegory in Pride and Prejudice
Phonocentrism: From Derrida to the Eighteenth Century and Beyond
Phonocentrism in Pride and Prejudice
Writing’s Rehabilitation
Dancing about Arche-Writing
Chapter 3: Allegory, Symbol, and Irony in Mansfield Park
Austen, Coleridge, Burke
The Fall of Symbol and the Rise of Allegory
Between Allegory and Irony: The Last Chapter
Between Allegory and Symbol: Lovers’ Vows
Chapter 4: Emma’s Parergonal Realism
Kant, Derrida, and the Parergon
Emma’s "Schemes in the In-Betweens"
Parergonal Lack
Parergonal Verse / Parergonal Prose
Confronting Front Matter
Sex and Citationality
Emma’s Headers and Footers
Horrors of Finery
Framing "Nothing"
Chapter 5: Austen’s Unromantic Romantic Ironies
From Comic to (German) Romantic Irony
Theorizing Parabasis: Fichte, Schlegel, and de Man
Parabasis of Parabasis in Emma
Tracing Austen’s Irony: "The History of England"
Closing the Ironic Opening of Pride and Prejudice
Mr. Bennet: Being Ironic
Irony and the Sublime
Biography
Shawn Normandin is an associate professor of English at Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul.
