Romantic Austen

A full-length scholarly monograph examining Jane Austen’s writings within the traditions of Romanticism. It argues that Austen’s central position within the literary canon can only be fully understood by locating her work within Romantic cultural traditions. Taking the contemporary Austen revival as its cue, the study presents a series of historically contextualized readings of Austen’s juvenilia (Catharine, or The Bower and The History of England), Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park and Austen’s posthumously published novel, Sanditon, to examine ways in which Romantic-period definitions of nation, culture and literature continue to function in contemporary readings of Austen and her period. An investigation of the sexual politics of national culture, heritage culture and literary canon-formation informs the study’s discussion of the relationship between Romanticism, Austen and the literary canon.

• First full-length monograph on Austen and Romanticism • Brings new insight into debate about how Austen is perceived today • Offers exciting new close readings of a wide range of Austen texts

List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; Note on texts used; Introduction. The ‘fall into a quotation’: tracking the canonical, Romantic and post-Romantic Austen; 1. Aunt Jane’s ‘early workings’ and ‘betweenities’: closet dramas of literary apprenticeship; 2. Sensibility, free indirect style and the Romantic technology of discretion; 3. Breeding heritage culture: Mansfield Park, Reflections on the Revolution in France and the glorious revolutions of the country house; 4. Austen’s Romantic fragment: Sanditon and the sexual politics of land speculation; Epilogue; Notes; Select bibliography; Index.

‘The most exhilirating aspects … lie in Tuite’s conceptualization of Austen’s oeuvre and in her brilliantly inventive, distinctive ways of opening up the texts to new readings, new echoes and new contexts.’ European Romantic Review