4 results on '"A. R. Benis"'
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2. The Neighborhoods of Northanger Abbey
- Author
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Toby R. Benis
- Subjects
Cultural Studies ,Social order ,Principal (commercial law) ,Aesthetics ,Opposition (planets) ,General Arts and Humanities ,Law ,Estate ,Sociology ,Space (commercial competition) ,Romance ,Urban environment - Abstract
In Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, a defining feature of Bath is the absence of stable neighbors, and neighborhoods: like its historical counterpart, Northanger Abbey’s Bath is a city of visitors. At the same time, Austen’s novel alludes to a network of texts and spatial practices usefully understood in terms of Henri Lefebvre’s “codes of space,” which aim to orient new arrivals within the urban environment as well as within a constantly shifting social order. Austen herself shows the breakdown of such attempts at regulation, which creates dangerous misunderstandings regarding Catherine Morland’s status even as it affords her unexpected romantic opportunities. The other principle setting of the novel, Northanger Abbey, operates in opposition to Bath insofar as General Tilney aims at exercising ironclad control over not only his estate, but the neighborhood in which it is embedded. The novel’s principal locations of Bath and Northanger thus serve as two spatial extremes, one lacking altogether in “neighbors” and the other suffocated by the dominating patriarch who conflates his estate with its surroundings.
- Published
- 2015
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3. Making the Modern Fan: Readerships and Aesthetics in Austen Studies
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Toby R. Benis
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Literature ,History ,business.industry ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Fictional universe ,Passion ,General Medicine ,Romance ,Rhetorical question ,HERO ,Narrative ,Plot (narrative) ,Fandom ,business ,media_common - Abstract
RAFF, SARAH. Jane Austen's Erotic Advice. Oxford & New York: Oxford UP, 2014. RAW, LAURENCE, and ROBERT G. DRYDEN, eds. Global Jane Austen: Pleasure, Passion and Possessiveness in the Jane Austen Community. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DUQUETTE, NATASHA, and ELISABETH LENCKOS, eds. Jane Austen and the Arts: Elegance, Propriety and Harmony. Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2014. Taken together, Jane Austen's Erotic Advice, Global Jane Austen, and Jane Austen and the Arts provide a snapshot of some current preoccupations of scholars of Austen and her contemporaries. Following on studies ranging from Janeites (2000), edited by Deidre Lynch, to Claudia Johnson's Jane Austen's Cults and Cultures (2012), in different ways Raff, Raw, and Dryden all engage with the Austen fandom. Sarah Raff's monograph explains the devotion of the Janeite as only the latest demonstration of the rhetorical power Austen consciously experimented with from her youth; Laurence Raw and Robert Dryden's contributors analyze Austen's popular reception and adaptation across mediums throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Natasha Duquette and Elisabeth Lenckos's interdisciplinary anthology likewise situates Austen's work within a wide-ranging frame, though in this case centered around eighteenth-century aesthetic theory as well as musical and other cultural practices. Sarah Raff's Jane Austen's Erotic Advice is a scholarly gem: beautifully written, theoretically sophisticated, erudite, and in command of its subject from the eighteenth through to the twenty-first centuries. This monograph draws connections between diverse texts and phenomena, in and of themselves familiar, but given new importance when considered together. Raff's opening insight is that the modern-day Austen devotee, longing for an Austen to script her life and loves, is a recasting of that familiar eighteenth-century literary type, the female Quixote. Raff contends that the conviction that today's fans possess, that Austen somehow understands their problems and that her novels are coded guides directing them to happiness and romantic fulfillment, taps into a deep truth: Austen the novelist did in fact write advice manuals, though of a peculiar, groundbreaking sort. Austen's plots disable critiques of Quixotism by showing that what poses as its opposite, sober didacticism, is in fact its double, since both depend on forms of literary seduction. In Raff's reading, Austen's signal achievement is her extension, particularly in her later novels, to include the reader her or himself in this process. Austen thus achieves unparalleled success in creating a state of "happy erotic anticipation" (164). Raff reaches this conclusion through the deployment of comprehensive literary references, rhetorical analysis, and biographical episodes. The argument closely examines the logic and linguistic structure of the generalization--such as the famous opening line of Pride and Prejudice--to show how such pronouncements are essential to both didactic novels and Quixote-inducing narratives. And precisely through its claim as "a truth universally acknowledged," the generalization punctures the wall between the fictional world and the world of the reader, promising that, if applied in the real world, it will facilitate the same satisfying outcomes at which the courtship plot aims. After presenting the history of the study's key terms, Raff provides detailed scrutiny of Austen's last four published novels. At first glance, what Raff calls the "vanishing narrator" of Pride and Prejudice seems to obviate her initial claims about the erotic relation between Austen as author and her readership. Raff's discussion shows, however, that this particular text anticipates Austen's subsequent narrative choices by casting a character--Darcy--as the master of the generalization. Elizabeth Bennet's dawning attraction to the hero is concomitant with her realization that he, not those in her neighborhood or her father, knows in the broadest sense the views and expectations of polite society. …
- Published
- 2014
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4. Transportation and the Reform of Narrative
- Author
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Toby R. Benis
- Subjects
Government ,History ,Literature and Literary Theory ,Visual Arts and Performing Arts ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Ignorance ,Prison ,Economic Justice ,Politics ,Capital (economics) ,Economic history ,Narrative ,Settlement (litigation) ,media_common - Abstract
British authorities established a penal colony in Australia in 1788 to resume a practice that had shaped the nation's justice for a century: banishment. Be fore it was interrupted by the American Revolution, transportation had be come a cornerstone of criminal sentencing, enabling the development of a legal code whose hundreds of capital crimes were in practice frequently pun ished by the less severe judgment of exile.1 The British knew little about Aus tralia beyond the sketchy reports produced by Captain James Cook's voyage some 17 years previously. Such ignorance finally did not stop the government from establishing a penal colony there, so desperate were authorities to dis pose of a growing backlog of convicts who were sentenced to transportation during the 1780s. During this decade the many convicts who formerly would have been shipped to America had nowhere to go; typhus epidemics caused by overcrowding in jails and prison ships along the Thames meant death sen tences for many who supposedly had eluded capital punishment.2 In reinstituting transportation, the Pitt ministry believed it had taken a key step in stabilizing the legal and social status quo. But the birth of the Bot any Bay colony would coincide with new challenges to British institutions brought on by the struggles of domestic political reformers, the French Revo lution, and the ensuing continental war. These developments led to a popular revision of transportation's significance, a revision given added force by the new penal settlement's location at the opposite end of the world. In particular, representations of seditionaries bound for Botany Bay, of their passage to Aus tralia, and of life in the colony were colored by social and political develop ments in Britain. On one hand, early British accounts of Botany Bay emphasized its utter strangeness. Robert Hughes notes that new arrivals saw the continent as "a land of inversions," where the seasons and even the stars displayed themselves in reversed or unfamiliar forms.3 However, the wide spread sense that everything in Australia was symbolically, as well as geo graphically, upside down enabled observers to use British conventions to
- Published
- 2003
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