1st Edition

Reading Jane Austen An Introduction

Edited By Danielle Spratt Copyright 2027
196 Pages 10 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

196 Pages 10 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

Reading Jane Austen: An Introduction captures the dynamic range of scholarly, popular, and pedagogical conversations that characterize contemporary Austen studies as a vibrant part of the broader Austen universe. Organized around historically oriented models of reading Austen’s works—re-evaluating the past, considering the present, and imagining the future—the volume includes eight new... Read more

Introduction

Part I: Reading Histories

1.       “What Have You Been Judging From?” Misdirected Sympathy, Shame, and Nation-Building in The Female Quixote and Northanger Abbey  
Kathleen Tamayo Alves  

2.       Reading for Contrary Purposes: Unsettling Domestic Intimacies in Mansfield Park and Janet Schaw’s Journal of a Lady of Quality 
Nina Moon 

3.       Virtue and Duty in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park 
Tim Black  

Part II: Reading Presentisms 

4.       Bad Marriages and Queer Desires: Adultery, Sodomy and Incest in Mansfield Park 
Susan Celia Greenfield 

5.       Anne Elliot’s Rabbit: The Intertextualities of Austen Adaptations  
Adela Ramos

6.       Austen and the Fantasies and Failures of Reproductive Justice 
Danielle Spratt 

 Part III: Reading Futures 

7.       The Politics of Play in Jane Austen and Silvia Moreno-Garcia 
Colleen Marie Tripp  

8.       Pro-Choice Austen: Persuasion and the Power of Writing the Self  
Jodi L. Wyett 

Conclusion: Call to Action 

Kathleen Tamayo Alves, Tim Black, Susan Celia Greenfield, Nina Moon, Adela Ramos, Danielle Spratt, Colleen Marie Tripp, and Jodi L. Wyett

Biography

Danielle Spratt (she/her) is Professor of English at California State University, Northridge, where she is Director of Community Engagement. Her areas of interest include eighteenth-century literature and culture, the history of science and medicine, the rise of the novel, public and digital humanities, and critical community engaged research and teaching. She is co-author of Engaging the Age of Jane Austen: Public Humanities in Practice and co-editor of Histories of Science: Natural Philosophy in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. She is currently finishing a monograph on the history of medicine and reproduction.