Reading and Watching

Janeites: Austen's Disciples and Devotees by Deidre Shauna Lynch

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


This is mostly missable.

The introduction lays out a good overview of Austen's reception by general audiences and the critical response to her work. The chapter "The Virago Jane Austen" by Katie Trumpener is the best of the book (very well written in the clear style I like best); Trumpener discusses Austen as a kind unifying force beneath the creation of the Virago books and the way in which some of those books respond to her legacy. Susan Fraiman's "Jane Austen and Edward Said: Gender, Culture, and Imperialism" is also quite good; it critiques Said's treatment of Austen and more largely his (non)treatment of feminist readings of it and other texts. Mary A. Favret's "Free and Happy: Jane Austen in America" is not as good as those two articles but is nonetheless interesting for its discussion of Austen's reception in America. "In Face of all the Servants: Spectators and Spies in Austen" by Roger Sales is kind of a structural mess; the thesis is a bit all over the place (is this about the servants in Austen? is it about how film adaptations replace servants with the camera? is it about how some of the female characters are treated like servants in the original texts and adaptations?) and even on the paragraph level there are some cohesion/coherency issues. However, even if everything Sales has to say doesn't belong together, what he's saying is interesting. The remaining five essays are utterly missable. Utterly.



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( spoilers for Lucifer )