General Consent in Jane Austen examines the "early" and "late" novels as well as the juvenilia in the light of three paradigms: "The Other Heroine" focuses on voices that challenge and compete with the central heroines, "Cameo Appearances" examines buried past narratives, and "Investigating Crimes" explores acts of violence. These three avenues into dialogic space destabilize conventional readings of Austen. The Bakhtinian model that structures this book is not one of linearity and balance but one of conflict, simultaneity, and multiplicity. While some novels fit into only one paradigm, others incorporate more than one; Mansfield Park receives the most attention. A bold and provocative study, General Consent in Jane Austen will be of interest not only to Austen scholars but to scholars of literary theory and dialogism.

Readings of Jane Austen tend to be polarized: she is seen either as conformist - the prevalent view - or quietly subversive. In General Consent in Jane Austen Barbara Seeber overcomes this critical stalemate, arguing that general consent does not exist as a given in Austen's texts. Instead, her texts reveal the process of manufacturing consent - of achieving ideological dominance by silencing dissent. Drawing on the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin, Seeber interrogates academic and popular constructions of Jane Austen, opening up Austen's "unresolvable dialogues."

Are Jane Austen and Charles Darwin the two great English empiricists of the nineteenth century? Peter W. Graham poses this question as he brings these two icons of nineteenth-century British culture into intellectual conversation in his provocative new book. Graham shows that while the one is generally termed a naturalist (Darwin's preferred term for himself) and the other a novelist, these characterizations are at least partially interchangeable, as each author possessed skills that would serve well in either arena. Both Austen and Darwin are naturalists who look with a sharp, cold eye at the concrete particulars of the world around them. Both are in certain senses novelists who weave densely particularized and convincingly grounded narratives that convey their personal observations and perceptions to wide readerships. When taken seriously, the words and works of Austen and Darwin encourage their readers to look closely at the social and natural worlds around them and form opinions based on individual judgment rather than on transmitted opinion. Graham's four interlocked essays begin by situating Austen and Darwin in the English empirical tradition and focusing on the uncanny similarities in the two writers' respective circumstances and preoccupations. Both Austen and Darwin were fascinated by sibling relations. Both were acute observers and analysts of courtship rituals. Both understood constant change as the way of the world, whether the microcosm under consideration is geological, biological, social, or literary. Both grasped the importance of scale in making observations. Both discerned the connection between minute, particular causes and vast, general effects. Employing the trenchant analytical talents associated with his subjects and informed by a wealth of historical and biographical detail and the best of recent work by historians of science, Graham has given us a new entree into Austen's and Darwin's writings.

Visuality in the Novels of Austen, Radcliffe, Edgeworth and Burney argues that the proliferation of visual codes, metaphors and references to the gaze in women’s novels published in Britain between 1778 and 1815 is more significant than scholars have previously acknowledged. The book’s innovative survey of the oeuvres of four culturally representative women novelists of the period spanning the Anglo-French War and the Battle of Waterloo reveals the importance of visuality – the continuum linking visual and verbal communication. It provided women novelists with a methodology capable of circumventing the cultural strictures on female expression in a way that concealed resistance within the limits of language. In contexts dominated by ‘frustrated utterance’, penetrating gazes and the perpetual threat of misinterpretation, Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth and Frances Burney used references to the visible and the invisible to comment on emotions, socio-economic conditions and patriarchal abuses. Visuality in the Novels of Austen, Radcliffe, Edgeworth and Burney offers new insights into verbal economy and the gender politics of the era by reassessing expression and perception from a uniquely telling point of view.

Reflecting the dynamic and expansive nature of Austen studies, A Companion to Jane Austen provides 42 essays from a distinguished team of literary scholars that examine the full breadth of the English novelist's works and career. Provides the most comprehensive and up-to-date array of Austen scholarship Functions both as a scholarly reference and as a survey of the most innovative speculative developments in the field of Austen studies Engages at length with changing contexts and cultures of reception from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries

Do Jane Austen novels truly celebrate—or undermine—romance and happy endings? How did Jane Austen become a cultural icon for fairy-tale endings when her own books end in ways that are rushed, ironic, and reluctant to satisfy readers' thirst for romance? In Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness, Austen scholar Inger Sigrun Bredkjær Brodey journeys through the iconic novelist's books in the first full-length study of Austen's endings. Through a careful exploration of Austen's own writings and those of the authors she read during her lifetime—as well as recent cultural reception and adaptations of her novels—Brodey examines the contradictions that surround this queen of romance. Brodey argues that Austen's surprising choices in her endings are an essential aspect of the writer's own sense of the novel and its purpose. Austen's fiercely independent and deeply humanistic ideals led her to develop a style of ending all her own. Writing in a culture that set a monetary value on success in marriage and equated matrimony with happiness, Austen questions these cultural norms and makes her readers work for their comic conclusions, carefully anticipating and shaping her readers' emotional involvement in her novels. Providing innovative and engaging readings of Austen's novels, Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness traces her development as an author and her convictions about authorship, novels, and the purpose of domestic fiction. In a review of modern film adaptions of Austen's work, the book also offers new interpretations while illustrating how contemporary ideas of marriage and happiness have shaped Austen's popular currency in the Anglophone world and beyond.