Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Writing at the outset of the twentieth century, Henry James famously complained that the public's enthusiasm for Jane Austen was being abetted by a “body of publishers, editors, [and] illustrators” who find “their ‘dear,’ our dear, everybody's dear, Jane so infinitely to their material purpose.” To be sure, James acknowledged that Austen would not be so “saleable if we had not more or less … lost our hearts to her” in the first place, but he censured the “special bookselling spirit” which, with all its “eager, active interfering force” whips up a “stiff breeze” and drives the waters of reputation above their natural levels. Writing at the outset of the twenty-first century, we can say with certainty that the waters of Austenian study, appreciation, and marketing have, far from subsiding, continued their steady rise, flooding beyond national and media boundaries. Shaped to some extent by the transformative energies of the global Austen surge of the mid 1990s – for we cannot really speak of revival in connection with a figure whose vitality has never abated – Austen study today is a diverse, expansive, excitable, critical life-form, with feelers that reach out and across disciplines. For popular audiences across the world, the plethora of cinematic adaptations and spin-offs of Austen's novels and life – and all the reviews and commentary they have in turn generated – have produced ... log in or subscribe to read full text