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Jane Austen and the Fiction of Culture
An Essay on the Narration of Social Realities
Jane Austen and the Fiction of Culture
An Essay on the Narration of Social Realities
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Description
With a new introduction by the authors, this paperback edition of Jane Austen and the Fiction of Culture takes the complete body of work of a major novelist as the basis for rethinking ethnographic representation and cross-cultural analysis.
Authors Handler and Segal have approached Jane Austen's writing as a source for interpreting the cultural ideology of kinship, social rank, courtship, and marriage in Austen's England. Arguing against the conventional reading of Austen as portrayer and upholder of a well-ordered society, they evaluate the rhetorical techniques that make Austen an effective ethnographer of diverse, though intertwined social realities. They show that Austen undercuts any and all claims to "truth universally acknowledged"-that is, to objective, positive knowledge of human affairs.
Jane Austen and the Fiction of Culture invites the reader to confront an ethnography of another time and place whose insights have a direct bearing on contemporary concerns in the humanities and human sciences.
Table of Contents
Chapter 2 A World of Marriage
Chapter 3 The Natural, the Civil, and the Unnatural
Chapter 4 Family, Connections, and Incest
Chapter 5 Hierarchies of Choice
Chapter 6 Courting Exchanges and Alter-Cultural Marriages
Chapter 7 Creative Dance and the Problem of Theatricality
Chapter 8 Narrating Multiple Realities
Chapter 9 Dialogue and Translation
Chapter 10 But What, Then, of Reality?
Product details
Published | Nov 03 1999 |
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Format | Paperback |
Edition | 1st |
Extent | 200 |
ISBN | 9780847690480 |
Imprint | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers |
Dimensions | 229 x 149 mm |
Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
About the contributors
Reviews
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This is an extraordinarily stimulating book-not least because the authors require the reader to confront an ethnographer of another time and another place whose own insights translate directly into contemporary concerns. Its core is one of Jane Austen's great insights: that significant observation does not require a vast canvas-it requires, simply but rigorously, the capacity to make what one observes signify.
Marilyn Strathern, University of Manchester