University of Auckland Centre for Continuing Education
Jane Austen: Past and Present
University of Auckland academics Janine Barchas and Joanne Wilkes will offer two different contexts for reading Austen.
Dr. Barchas will focus on the Austen's own Georgian era, detailing the economic realities of "200 a year" and revealing that Austen plucks names for her protagonists from the family trees of genuine Regency celebrities. Dr. Wilkes will track Austen's critical reception across the centuries.
Session detail
Course outline
This is a three-hour seminar that looks at the canonical and popular literary figure Jane Austen from two perspectives. Georgian culture specialist Janine Barchas draws on research for her forthcoming book to contextualise Austen in her own period, discussing in particular the way Austen used, for many characters, family names known to herself and her contemporaries. Thus she enhanced the associations readers could have brought to the novels, associations largely lost to modern readers. She also discusses the economic realities faced by people of the classes Austen writes about. Joanne Wilkes deploys her knowledge of the reception history of Austen's novels to outline the varying ways in which they have been received over the past two centuries. She covers both critics and other readers - showing how Austen has been reinvented for each generation, in line with its own attitudes and priorities.
Learning outcomes
Learners will gain an enhanced understanding of the works of one of the most famous British writers - how she can be related closely to her own time, and how her works have aroused a range of critical and popular responses in the two centuries since.
Who should attend?
Readers of Jane Austen