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  1. Home
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  3. Jane Austen's Art of Memory
  • Cited by 26
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
August 2009
Print publication year:
1989
Online ISBN:
9780511519031
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511519031
Subjects:
Literature, English Literature 1700-1830
Information

Book description

Jane Austen's Art of Memory offers a radical new thesis about Jane Austen's construction of her art. It argues that, with the help of her tenacious memory, she engaged in friendly dialogue with her predecessors, the English writers, a process that the eighteenth century called 'imitation'. Her allusions, far from being random, thicken and complicate her novels in a manner that is poetic rather than mimetic. Difficult critical cruxes resolve when her books are set within her own great tradition which included Locke, Richardson, Milton, Shakespeare, and (unexpectedly) Chaucer, and she is found to be an educated and supremely conscious writer.

Reviews

‘ … a genuinely original work, and one of considerable interest for what it has to teach us about a major writer. What it offers is a rather rare thing: a ‘new’ Jane Austen, who was not merely open in ‘influences’ from her desultory reading but had read certain authors intensely and creatively, almost as Keats read Shakespeare or Eliot read Dante. The book is no less than a recreation of substantial areas of Jane Austen’s mental and imaginative life.’

Norman Page - University of Nottingham

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