LIT 499-05 Diane Steinberg Political Jane Austen
British novelist Jane Austen (1775-1817) wrote amidst new ideas about the political order — Enlightenment theorists such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke, philosophers such as David Hume, economists such as Adam Smith, and political theorists such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine — and amidst the political upheavals of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars and newly emerging movements for women’s rights and against slavery. The seminar will read these political thinkers next to Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion. We will also move beyond Austen’s own lifetime to read Karl Marx, Louis Althusser, and Edward Said, applying Marxist and postcolonial ideas to Austen’s novels. Lastly, we’ll explore Austen’s appropriation by white supremacists who want to see her as an English white nationalist. Students will write two essays supported by critical research and by a theoretical underpinning.