Waterstones The Making of Jane Austen
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Price: £16.50
Brand: Waterstones
Description: An engaging account of how Jane Austen became a household name. Just how did Jane Austen become the celebrity author and the inspiration for generations of loyal fans she is today? Devoney Looser's The Making of Jane Austen turns to the people, performances, activism, and images that fostered Austen's early fame, laying the groundwork for the beloved author we think we know. Here are the Austen influencers, including her first English illustrator, the eccentric Ferdinand Pickering, whose sensational gothic images may be better understood through his brushes with bullying, bigamy, and an attempted matricide. The daring director-actress Rosina Filippi shaped Austen's reputation with her pioneering dramatizations, leading thousands of young women to ventriloquize Elizabeth Bennet's audacious lines before drawing room audiences. Even the supposedly staid history of Austen scholarship has its bizarre stories. The author of the first Jane Austen dissertation, student George Pellew, tragically died young, but he was believed by many, including his professor-mentor, to have come back from the dead. Looser shows how these figures and their Austen-inspired work transformed Austen's reputation, just as she profoundly shaped theirs. Through them, Looser describes the factors and influences that radically altered Austen's evolving image. Drawing from unexplored material, Looser examines how echoes of that work reverberate in our explanations of Austen's literary and cultural power. Whether you're a devoted Janeite or simply Jane-curious, The Making of Jane Austen will have you thinking about how a literary icon is made, transformed, and handed down from generation to generation.
Category: Books
Merchant: Waterstones
Product ID: 9781421428994
Delivery cost: 2.99
ISBN: 9781421428994
Author: Corrie
Rating: 5
Review: I discovered Devoney Looser while writing a paper on Northanger Abbey. She is an expert on everything Austen and I will always stop what I'm doing to read anything she's written. Her Austen course, available on Amazon in the Great Courses subscription, is also something I highly recommend. I subscribed to it solely so I could watch the course videos, and I was not disappointed. This book goes hand-in-hand with her series, and I encourage anyone who is interested in reading Austen at a higher level to purchase both.
Author: Keith Steventon
Rating: 4
Review: This is an interesting perspective on how the image of Jane Austin and her works has been amended by the way it has been interpreted, over time, by book illustrators, by adaption for the stage and then for the cinema and television. You are forced to reflect on how your own idea of 'Dear Aunt Jane' has been constructed by what you have read and watched. Has there been an evolution in your idea that parallels that identified and discussed by Devoney Looser. You should read this if you have any interest in Austen, you do not have to be a 'Jane-ite'.
