Jane Austen and Religion

Jane Austen is often thought of as a secular author, because religion seems absent from her novels, because she satirises her clerical characters, and because history and literacy criticism - and the literary sensibility of the twenty-first century reader - is overwhelmingly secular. Michael Giffin offers a reading of Austen's published novels against the background of a 'long eighteenth century' that stretched from the Restoration to the end of the Georgian period. He demonstrates that Austen is a neoclassical author of the Enlightenment who writes through the twin prisms of British Empiricism and Georgian Anglicanism. His focus is on how Austen's novels mirror a belief in natural law and natural order; and how they reflect John Locke's theory of knowledge through reason, revelation and reflection on experience. His reading suggests there is a thread of neoclassical philosophy and theology running through and between each of Austen's novels, which is best understood in its cultural context.

Auteur

MICHAEL GIFFIN is postgraduate course author and supervisor in Literature and Theology at the Sydney College of Divinity. As an author he has published three books of literary criticism as well as several journal articles in Literature and Theology. As an Anglican priest Michael has ministered in parishes, psychiatric hospitals, aged care facilities, hospices, universities and schools and is currently licensed to officiate as a priest within the Diocese of Sydney.

Résumé
This essential guide explores and celebrates the rise and development of modernist and avant-garde literatures and theories in the period 1910-1945, from Imagism to the Apocalypse movement. Jane Goldman charts transitions in writing, reading, performing and publishing practices, and in international groupings and regroupings of writers and artists, and interrogates the term 'Modernism' which labels the era. Goldman introduces students to the work of many canonical high modernist writers, such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, and samples the work of other important modernist figures, including Nathanael West, John Rodker, Aldous Huxley and the Harlem Renaissance poets.

Contenu

The Economy of Salvation Northanger Abbey Sense and Sensibility Pride and Prejudice Mansfield Park Emma Persuasion References Selected Bibliography Index