Jane Austen's Cults and Cultures - Softcover

Johnson, Claudia L.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022615503X ISBN 13: 9780226155036

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2014

Synopsis

Jane Austen completed only six novels, but enduring passion for the author and her works has driven fans to read these books repeatedly, in book clubs or solo, while also inspiring countless film adaptations, sequels, and even spoofs involving zombies and sea monsters. Austen’s lasting appeal to both popular and elite audiences has lifted her to legendary status. In Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures, Claudia L. Johnson shows how Jane Austen became “Jane Austen,” a figure intensely—sometimes even wildly—venerated, and often for markedly different reasons.

Johnson begins by exploring the most important monuments and portraits of Austen, considering how these artifacts point to an author who is invisible and yet whose image is inseparable from the characters and fictional worlds she created. She then passes through the four critical phases of Austen’s reception—the Victorian era, the First and Second World Wars, and the establishment of the Austen House and Museum in 1949—and ponders what the adoration of Austen has meant to readers over the past two centuries. For her fans, the very concept of “Jane Austen” encapsulates powerful ideas and feelings about history, class, manners, intimacy, language, and the everyday. By respecting the intelligence of past commentary about Austen, Johnson shows, we are able to revisit her work and unearth fresh insights and new critical possibilities.

An insightful look at how and why readers have cherished one of our most beloved authors, Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures will be a valuable addition to the library of any fan of the divine Jane.

About this title

About the Author:

Claudia L. Johnson is the Murray Professor of English Literature at Princeton University. She is the author or editor of several books, including Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel and Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

Review:

“Claudia L. Johnson’s long-anticipated book on the history of Austen fandom turns out, not surprisingly, to have been amply worth the wait. With characteristic intelligence, judiciousness, and lucidity, Johnson teases out the ideas that have informed our evolving construction of this most popular and yet most elusive of literary figures. Johnson sinks her roots very deeply into the source material, showing how Austen became an icon for all seasons, giving us back the image we have required of her in war and peace, modernity and postmodernity, the British Empire and the Empire of Hollywood. Following in the tradition of studies of Shakespearean canonization, this is the real ‘Becoming Jane.’”

(William Deresiewicz, author of A Jane Austen Education)

“What a pleasure to read this book! Richly informative and altogether delightful, Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures tells about Austen in the trenches, read by soldiers on the front lines in two world wars, for sharply different reasons; about the complicated afterlife of Austen as a physical being; about the charms and disappointments of Austen’s house in its current form; about ways of reading. There’s more, too, all of it compelling, all revealing how powerfully Jane Austen survives in cultural consciousness. This is both a wonderful read and a source of great illumination.”

(Patricia Meyer Spacks, author of On Rereading)

“Johnson does more than trace out Austen’s legacy and rethink the way critics and fans alike have tried to hold on to this elusive writer—she displays the wealth of the novels themselves in new, surprising, and always intelligent ways. Packed with the fruits of Johnson’s brilliant work in the archive, this book also creates a compelling narrative from the accounts of readers, worshippers, and critics alike, and fashions a very delicate path between the adoring and the critical. A monumental work by perhaps the premier scholar of Austen’s work and legacy.”

(Mary Favret, Indiana University)

“There are some revealing passages that show how changing culture invites reinterpretation of Jane Austen and her works.” (The Economist)

“Johnson’s prose is lively and witty. . . . [Her] writing is infused with nuanced appreciation of Austen’s sophisticated art.” (Times Literary Supplement)

“Johnson’s writing style is a lively mix of scholarly and colorful vocabulary concisely presenting complex ideas.” (Library Journal)

“Johnson wields a wide range of fascinating sources and key texts, deftly weaving them into her argument and narrative.” (Times Higher Education)

“It was a real pleasure to read this book. It is richly informative and clearly outlines the ways in which Austen has been constructed and her writings interpreted by readers from the Victorian period through now in a way that is both scholarly and accessible and, sometime even, playful with such delightfully accurate lines as ‘the Austen they adore has more to do with the world of wonder than with the world of reason’ and ‘to be a Janeite is really a form of possession, with a profound contentment in being thus possessed.’ ” (Austenprose.com)

“Even the most devoted Janeite will learn much from this delightful book. . . . Essential.” (Choice)

 “At the heart of Claudia Johnson’s warmly appreciative study is the sole authenticated image of the novelist: a portrait, by her sister, of Jane Austen with her back to the viewer. Johnson . . . traces out the silences and losses surrounding Austen. Her aim is not so much to shine a light on the fiction as on its admirers. . . . Johnson's argument about how bodies and things govern our reading of Austen is funny and illuminating.” (Literary Review)

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 022615503X
• ISBN 13: 9780226155036
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240