Great Authors: Jane Austen

Catalog description

Jane Austen is perhaps the most beloved of all British novelists. Her fans read and reread, and the novels repay the effort with their curious mix of fairy-tale romance and biting social satire. In this course, we will study one of Austen's "lesser" novels--Lady Susan--five of Austen's major novels, all of which have been successfully adapted to film, and The History of England, which Austen wrote at the age of fifteen. We will we focus on content--style, voice, structure, genre, character development--and on context--the late 18th-/early 19th-century revolutionary period, the Napoleonic wars, Austen's contemporaries (from Ann Radcliffe to Walter Scott and Lord Byron), the English Regency, and Austen's own life.