Jane Austen and Company : Collected Essays

by Stovel, Nora Foster

• ISBN13: 9780888645487
• ISBN10: 0888645481
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-02-15
• Publisher: Wayne State Univ Pr

Summary

Here we come to know Jane Austen by the company she keeps: her predecessors Fielding, Sterne, Lennox, and Burney, her contemporary Scott, and her successors Waugh and Amis#x14;comic novelists all. And comedy is the connection between these twelve elegant essays by the distinguished academic Bruce Stovel, who most lovingly engages Austen herself through his studies of her comic novels, her art of conversation, her pleasure principle, and her prayers. Edited by Nora Foster Stovel, the collection includes an introduction by Juliet McMaster and an afterword by Isobel Grundy.

Author Biography

Bruce Stovel (1941-2007) was Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Alberta. He co-edited two collections of essays on Austen and contributed to The Cambridge Companion on Jane Austen. Stovel's passion for teaching, literature, and blues music was celebrated in Jane Austen Sings the Blues. Nora Foster Stovel is Professor of English at the University of Alberta, where she teaches twentieth-century literature and Canadian women's fiction. She has published books and articles on Jane Austen, D.H. Lawrence, Margaret Drabble, Carol Shields, and Margaret Laurence, most recently Divining Margaret Laurence: A Study of Her Complete Writings.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. VII
Acknowledgements	p. XV
Introduction	p. XVII
Tom Jones and the Odyssey	p. 1
Tristram Shandy and the Art of Gossip	p. 21
ôFemale Difficultiesö: Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote and Frances Burney's Camilla	p. 35
Waverley and the Aeneid: Scott's Art of Allusion	p. 55
Jane Austen and the Pleasure Principle	p. 75
Asking versus Telling: One Aspect of Jane Austen's Idea of Conversation	p. 95
ôA Contrariety of Emotionö: Jane Austen's Ambivalent Lovers in Pride and Prejudice	p. 117
Once More, with Feeling: The Structure of Mansfield Park	p. 129
Comic Symmetry in Jane Austen's Emma	p. 145
ôThe Sentient Target of Deathö: Jane Austen's Prayers	p. 163
The Genesis of Evelyn Waugh's Comic Vision: Waugh, Captain Grimes, and Decline and Fall	p. 181
Traditional Comedy and the Comic Mask in Kingsley Amis's: Lucky Jim	p. 203
Afterword	p. 221
Works Cited	p. 225
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