Liberty in Jane Austen’s Persuasion is a meditation on Persuasion as a text in which Jane Austen, writing in the Age of Revolution, enters the conversation of her epoch. Poets, philosophers, theologians and political thinkers of the long eighteenth century, including William Cowper, George Gordon Byron, Samuel Johnson, Hugh Blair, Thomas Sherlock, Edmund Burke, and Charles Pasley, endeavored definitively to determine what it means for a human being to be free. Persuasion is Austen’s elegant, artful and complex addition to this conversation. In this study, Kathryn Davis proposes that Austen's last complete novel offers an apologia for human liberty primarily understood as self-governance. Austen’s characters struggle to attain liberty, not from an oppressive political regime or stifling social conventions, but for a type of excellence that is available to each human being. The novel's presentation of moral virtue has wider cultural significance as a force that shapes both the “little social commonwealth[s]” inhabited by characters of Austen’s own making and, possibly, the identity of the nation whose sovereign read Persuasion.

Austen lived in the nineteenth century when the social custom of English community considered the characterization of women as superstitious and inherently irrational creatures who must be kept firmly in hand by the patriarchal establishment. The concept of moral education, religious faith and social ethics are highly regarded and protected in the public life. With these concepts people come to see the world and themselves clearly and thereby become better human beings and personality. Au sten interpreted education as the development of the whole personality which lead to the intellectual power. Austen defines creative rhetoric is a form of persuasion distinct from violence and exploitation which showed how a person went further than he intended, and came safe. She properly applied this form in her novels to channel her interior freedom and liberty. Through a rhetoric persuasion and manipulation as an author, she went to reform and to reconcile the so-called insignificance of the social status of human being and liberated them. Her idea presents a fresh, interdisciplinary approach to feminist literary studies. The author, Kathryn Eileen Davis found that interior freedom leads one to discover that even in the most difficult circumstances we possess within ourselves a space of freedom and LIBERTY that nobody can take away, because God is the source and it is guaranteed. This interior freedom helps us growing in faith, hope, and love. Liberty to make decision is possible when a co-dependent establishes self-esteem to love and be loved, to be both willing and able to function in loving relationships.

Tracing the rise of conduct literature and the didactic novel over the course of the eighteenth century, this book explores how British women used the didactic novel genre to engage in political debate during and immediately after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Although didactic novels were frequently conventional in structure, they provided a venue for women to uphold, to undermine, to interrogate, but most importantly, to write about acceptable social codes and values. The essays discuss the multifaceted ways in which didacticism and women’s writing were connected and demonstrate the reforming potential of this feminine and ostensibly constricting genre. Focusing on works by novelists from Jane West to Susan Ferrier, the collection argues that didactic novels within these decades were particularly feminine; that they were among the few acceptable ways by which women could participate in public political debate; and that they often blurred political and ideological boundaries. The first part addresses both conservative and radical texts of the 1790s to show their shared focus on institutional reform and indebtedness to Mary Wollstonecraft, despite their large ideological range. In the second part, the ideas of Hannah More influence the ways authors after the French revolution often linked the didactic with domestic improvement and national unity. The essays demonstrate the means by which the didactic genre works as a corrective not just on a personal and individual level, but at the political level through its focus on issues such as inheritance, slavery, the roles of women and children, the limits of the novel, and English and Scottish nationalism. This book offers a comprehensive and wide-ranging picture of how women with various ideological and educational foundations were involved in British political discourse during a time of radical partisanship and social change.

Examines the religious dimensions of Ralph Ellison’s concept of race Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man provides an unforgettable metaphor for what it means to be disregarded in society. While the term “invisibility” has become shorthand for all forms of marginalization, Ellison was primarily concerned with racial identity. M. Cooper Harriss argues that religion, too, remains relatively invisible within discussions of race and seeks to correct this through a close study of Ralph Ellison’s work. Harriss examines the religious and theological dimensions of Ralph Ellison’s concept of race through his evocative metaphor for the experience of blackness in America, and with an eye to uncovering previously unrecognized religious dynamics in Ellison’s life and work. Blending religious studies and theology, race theory, and fresh readings of African-American culture, Harriss draws on Ellison to create the concept of an “invisible theology,” and uses this concept as a basis for discussing religion and racial identity in contemporary American life. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology is the first book to focus on Ellison as a religious figure, and on the religious dynamics of his work. Harriss brings to light Ellison’s close friendship with theologian and literary critic Nathan A. Scott, Jr., and places Ellison in context with such legendary religious figures as Reinhold and Richard Niebuhr, Paul Tillich and Martin Luther King, Jr. He argues that historical legacies of invisible theology help us make sense of more recent issues like drone warfare and Clint Eastwood’s empty chair. Rich and innovative, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology will revolutionize the way we understand Ellison, the intellectual legacies of race, and the study of religion.

'In Persuasion, Jane Austen is beginning to discover that the world is larger, more mysterious, and more romantic than she had supposed' Virginia Woolf Jane Austen's moving late novel of missed opportunities and second chances centres on Anne Elliot, no longer young and with few romantic prospects. Eight years earlier, she was persuaded by others to break off her engagement to poor, handsome naval captain Frederick Wentworth. What happens when they meet again is movingly told in Austen's last completed novel. Set in the fashionable societies of Lyme Regis and Bath, Persuasion is a brilliant satire of vanity and pretension, and a mature, tender love story tinged with heartache. Edited with an Introduction by Gillian Beer

This Top Five Classics illustrated edition of Jane Austen’s Persuasion features: • 30 full-color illustrations by Charles E. Brock • an informative Introduction • a detailed Biography and Bibliography Originally published in December 1817, just five months after Jane Austen died at the age of 41, Persuasion was her last completed novel. Released with Northanger Abbey as a four-volume set, its publication marked the first time Austen was acknowledged as the author of these and her previous four novels. Persuasion begins eight years after Anne Elliot’s love affair was thwarted by her well-meaning mentor, Lady Russell. Now Anne must endure being thrust into company with her former fiancé, as he courts another, younger woman. Persuasion is not only one of Austen’s most popular novels, it is her most mature.