Mansfield Park (Norton Critical Editions)

by Austen, Jane; Johnson, Claudia L.

• ISBN13: 9780393967913
• ISBN10: 0393967913
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1998-01-17
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Summary

Through Fanny Price, the heroine of Mansfield Park, Jane Austen views the social mores of her day and contemplates human nature itself. A shy and sweet-tempered girl adopted by wealthy relations, Fanny is an outsider looking in on an unfamiliar, and often inhospitable, world. But Fanny eventually wins the affection of her benefactors, endearing herself to the Bertram family and the reader alike. In her Introduction, Carol Shields writes, [Mansfield Park's] overriding theme is difficult to isolate, since the novel is about everything it touches upon: nurturing, steadfastness, belonging and not belonging, about fine gradations of moral persuasion, about human noise and silence, and about action and stillness.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix	(2)
Introduction	xi
Jane Austen and Mansfield Park	xi	(2)
A Note on Money in Austen's Novels	xiii	(3)
A Note on Austen and the Text of Mansfield Park	xvi
The Text of Mansfield Park	1	(326)
Map of England	2	(1)
Facsimile title page	3	(2)
Mansfield Park	5	(318)
Textual Notes	323	(4)
Contexts	327	(86)
Elizabeth Inchbald
Lovers' Vows (1798)	329	(46)
Jane Austen
Opinions of Mansfield Park (1814, 1815)	375	(4)
Evening Prayer No. I	379	(1)
A Companion to the Altar	380	(2)
On Family Prayer	380	(2)
Humphrey Repton
Sketches and Hints on Landscape Gardening (1795)	382	(4)
From Chapter III. Proper Situations for a House	382	(4)
Observations on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1803)	386	(1)
From Chapter VII. Farm and Park Distinct Objects	386	(1)
William Cowper
The Task (1785)	387	(4)
From Book I. The Sofa	387	(1)
From Book III. The Garden	388	(3)
John Gregory
A Father's Legacy to His Daughter (1774)	391	(2)
From Conduct and Behaviour	391	(2)
From Amusements	393	(1)
Mary Wollstonecraft
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)	393	(5)
From Chapter II. The Prevailing Opinion of a Sexual Character Discussed	393	(4)
From Chapter III. The Same Subject Continued	397	(1)
Thomas Gisborne
An Enquiry into the Duties of Men in the Higher and Middle Classes of Society in Great Britain (1794)	398	(3)
From Chapter XI. On the Duties of the Clerical Profession	398	(3)
An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (1797)	401	(3)
From Chapter IX. On Amusements in General	401	(1)
From Chapter X. On the Employment of Time	402	(2)
Hannah More
Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799)	404	(2)
From Chapter VI. Filial Obedience Not the Character of the Age	404	(2)
Parliamentary Debates (1806)	406	(3)
From Abolition of the Slave Trade	406	(3)
Thomas Clarkson
From History of the... Abolition of the African Slave Trade... (1808)	409	(1)
Elizabeth Inchbald
Remarks on Shakespeare's King Henry VIII (1806-09)	410	(3)
Criticism	413	(98)
Jan Fergus
Power and Mansfield Park	415	(8)
Lionel Trilling
Mansfield Park	423	(11)
Alistair Duckworth
Mansfield Park: Jane Austen's Grounds of Being	434	(11)
Nina Auerbach
Jane Austen's Dangerous Charm: Feeling as One Ought about Fanny Price	445	(13)
Claudia L. Johnson
Mansfield Park: Confusions of Guilt and Revolutions of Mind	458	(18)
Joseph Litvak
The Infection of Acting: Theatricals and Theatricality in Mansfield Park	476	(14)
Edward Said
Jane Austen and Empire	490	(3)
Brian Southam
The Silence of the Bertrams	493	(5)
Joseph Lew
"That Abominable Traffic": Mansfield Park and the Dynamics of Slavery	498	(13)
Jane Austen: A Chronology	511	(2)
Selected Bibliography	513