Jane Austen was received by her contemporaries as a new voice, but her late twentieth-century reputation as a nostalgic reactionary still lingers on. In this radical revision of her engagement with the culture and politics of her age, Peter Knox-Shaw argues that Austen was a writer steeped in the Enlightenment, and that her allegiance to a sceptical tradition within it, shaped by figures such as Adam Smith and David Hume, lasted throughout her career. Knox-Shaw draws on archival and other neglected sources to reconstruct the intellectual atmosphere of the Steventon Rectory where Austen wrote her juvenilia, and follows the course of her work through the 1790s and onwards, showing how minutely responsive it was to the many shifting movements of those turbulent years. Jane Austen and the Enlightenment is an important contribution to the study both of Jane Austen and of intellectual history at the turn of the nineteenth century.
Peter Knox-Shaw is a Research Associate at the University of Cape Town.
Part I. The Eighteenth-Century Legacy: 1. Auspices; 2. Pride and Prejudice, a politics of the picturesque; 3. Northanger Abbey and the liberal historians; 4. Sense and Sensibility and the philosophers; Part II. Engaging with the New Age: 5. Diffraction; 6. Mansfield Park: charting the religious revival; 7. Emma, and the flaws of sovereignty; 8. Persuasion: light on an old genre; 9. Sanditon and speculation; Bibliography.
'An intelligent and inspiring critique that asks us to return to Austen, her contemporaries and her predecessors with an increased sensitivity to the connections between them, and a renewed pleasure in the complexity of the novels themselves.' Michael Caines, The Times Literary Supplement
