Events

In this talk, I situate Jane Austen’s fiction within a larger conversation about worlds and worlding that has emerged over the course of our Thursday Lecture Series this semester. The main part of my presentation focuses on Austen’s fiction to show how the formal trajectory of the English novel helped to create and complicate new ideas about the shape and extent of the social world. I center on Austen’s three novels named after places—in particular, Mansfield Park—and argue that these works can be understood as comparative analyses of various settings and of their suitability as environments in which disparate and distant persons might coexist. In these works, Austen ironizes any notion of the sufficiency of representations to capture the extent of the social world. Her conclusion is not a wholly negative one, however. By virtue of the completeness of novelistic form—a work’s accountability to its own materials—her novels sustain a political demand for fuller representations of the world, even as they insist on the necessary insufficiency of those efforts.