Prospect And Refuge in the Landscape of Jane Austen

by Wenner,Barbara Britton

• ISBN13: 9780754651789
• ISBN10: 0754651789
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-01-28
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

How do Austen's heroines find a way to prevail in their environments? How do they make the landscape work for them? In what ways does Austen herself use landscape to convey meaning? These are among the questions Barbara Britton Wenner asks as she explores how Austen uses landscape to extend the range of reflection and activity for her female protagonists. Women, Wenner argues, create private spaces within the landscape that offer them the power of knowledge gained through silent and invisible observation. She traces the construction of these hidden refuges in Austen's six major novels, as well as in her juvenilia and her final, unfinished novel, Sanditon. Her book will be an important resource for Austen specialists and for those interested generally in the importance of landscape in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women's fiction writing.

Author Biography

Barbara Britton Wenner is an associate professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Cincinnati, USA.

Table of Contents

List of Figures	vii
Preface	ix
Acknowledgements	xv
An Introduction to the Landscape of Jane Austen	1	(12)
The Potential of Death by Landscape	13	(18)
``Four White Cows Disposed at Equal Distances''---or---Steel Traps to Bowers in Austen's Short Fiction	31	(10)
Heroines-in-Training: The First Three	41	(22)
Enclaves of Civility amidst Clamorous Impertinence	63	(20)
The Geography of Persuasion	83	(20)
Sanditon: Half Topography, Half Romance	103	(8)
Some Nineteenth-Century Reactions, Twenty-First Century Women in the Landscape and Final Remarks	111	(6)
Bibliography	117	(4)
Index	121