1st Edition

Jane Austen's Men Rewriting Masculinity in the Romantic Era

By Sarah Ailwood Copyright 2019
166 Pages
by Routledge

178 Pages
by Routledge

178 Pages
by Routledge

This book illuminates Jane Austen’s exploration of masculinity through the courtship romance genre in the socially, politically and culturally turbulent Romantic era. Austen scrutinises, satirises, censures and ultimately rewrites dominant modes of masculinity through the courtship romance plot between her heroines and male protagonists. This book reveals that Austen pioneers and celebrates a new... Read more

Introduction: Rewriting Masculinity in the Romantic Era

Chapter One
The men of ‘real Life’: Educating the Reader in Sense and Sensibility

Chapter Two
"I will prove myself a man": Northanger Abbey

Chapter Three
‘A man violently in love’: Pride and Prejudice

Chapter Four
"You will make him everything": Masculine Redemption in Mansfield Park

Chapter Five
"A disgrace to the name of man": Emma, the National Tale and the Historical Novel

Chapter Six
‘Feelings glad to burst their usual restraints’: Persuasion

Conclusion: Sanditon, Unfinished Work and New Directions

Biography

Sarah Ailwood is Assistant Professor at the University of Canberra. She completed her PhD on Jane Austen and masculinity at the University of Wollongong, and has published essays and articles on Austen’s men. She co-edited Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence (EUP, 2015) and has wide research interests in women’s writing, particularly historical and contemporary life narrative and legal experience.

"In Jane Austen's Men: Rewriting Masculinity for the Romantic Era, Sarah Ailwood demolishes once and for all the notion that Jane Austen did not understand men. In this engaging, deeply perceptive book, she argues that Austen undertook the inherently risky task of re-creating a psychologically complex masculinity to complement women's individual agency and subjectivity. Companionate marriage, in Austen's reworking of the romantic courtship novel, looks both attractive and startlingly modern."

--Jocelyn Harris, Professor Emerita, University of Otago.