Book Chapter Details
Mandatory Fields
Cano, Marina
2013 Unknown
Global Jane Austen: Pleasure, Passion, and Possessiveness in the Jane Austen Community
In Flesh and Blood: Jane Austen as a Postmodern Fictional Character
Palgrave
London
Published
1
Optional Fields
This chapter examines postmodern fictionalisations of Jane Austen—in particular, Stephanie Barron’s The Barque of Frailty and Michael Thomas Ford’s Jane Bites Back—and analyzes their intermingling of Austen’s biography and vampire/detective narratives. My chapter proposes that Austen author fictions simultaneously support and subvert essential meanings about the author deriving from the Victorian period (as quaint and saintly). These novels recreate Austen as a contradictory character: from the 1800s and the 2000s, Augustan and Romantic, liberal and conservative. As a primarily western genre, Austen fictionalisations welcome the polyphony and heteroglossia that characterises postmodernism, but also impose their “meaning” on western and eastern Janeite communities. These novels, thus, expose Euro-American Janeitism as a contradictory, multi-faceted phenomenon, but ultimately also postmodernism.
http://www.palgraveconnect.com/pc/doifinder/10.1057/9781137270764.0013?focus=true
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