Uses of Austen

This collection of essays focuses on the ways in which the life and work of Jane Austen is being re-framed and re-imagined in 20th and 21st-century literature and culture. Tracing the connections between the construction of a Modernist Jane Austen in the early 20th century and feminist and post-feminist appropriations of her texts in the later 20th century, the essays in this volume also examine the ways in which Austen has more recently emerged as a complex point of reference on the global stage, her novels being adapted in settings ranging from Amritsar to California, her name being invoked in political discourse on internet sites and in the printed press as shorthand for English or more broadly Western liberal cultural values. The volume is distinctive in its international scope, and in its focus on Austen as a dynamic cultural signifier. Together, the essays explore the richness and complexity of the cultural encounters generated through re-inscriptions of an imagined 'Jane Austen', and ask what they can tell us about contemporary desires for cultural authority and authenticity.

GILLIAN DOW is Lecturer in English at the University of Southampton, UK, and Director of Research at Chawton House Library. She has published on French and British women's writing of the Romantic period, on translation, on the reception of foreign literature in Britain, and on the cross-channel rise of the novel in the long eighteenth century.
CLARE HANSON is Professor of English at the University of Southampton, UK. She has published extensively on twentieth century women's writing, is a founding member of the Contemporary Women's Writing Association and co-editor of the journal Contemporary Women's Writing. Her most recent books are A Cultural History of Pregnancy (2004) and Eugenics, Literature and Culture in Post-war Britain (2012).