(Download) "William H. Galperin. The Historical Austen (Book Review)" by Studies in Romanticism # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: William H. Galperin. The Historical Austen (Book Review)
- Author : Studies in Romanticism
- Release Date : January 22, 2005
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 172 KB
Description
William H. Galperin. The Historical Austen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Pp. 286. $19.95 paper. The Historical Austen by William Galperin is, as its title announces, a historical examination of Jane Austen's writings. It returns the novels to the circumstances of their production, clarifying the overlapping and, at times, overdetermined workings of Austen's social, political, and aesthetic contexts. But it is considerably more than a work of historical contextualization or, rather, it gives the work of historical contextualization a fresh interpretive impetus by insisting on "the prospect of historical agency" (216). The emphasis on agency in relation to context poses a challenge to methodologies that assume, in Galperin's words, "that the material and cultural circumstances of a given text ... work somehow to divest the text of the awareness that has devolved most recently upon the historically minded reader" (217). Galperin's Austen is not only an astute and historically self-conscious critic of the social conditions in which her fiction becomes possible (an Austen who is at least somewhat familiar to feminist criticism) but an equally reflexive critic of the "realism" that her fiction brings into being in its representations of those conditions.