Jane Austen’s earliest surviving fiction is collected in a manuscript volume she titled Volume the First. While later stories such as Volume the Second’s “Love and Freindship”, Volume the Third’s “Catharine”, and the recently filmed Lady Susan have received comparatively greater critical attention, the stories included in Volume the First clearly merit equal consideration. Here we find Austen at her most subversive, her most experimental, and her most outrageous. At their least impressive, these stories offer the careful reader a chance to witness the development of one of English literature’s greatest novelists; at their best, they stand on their own as gorgeous burlesques of eighteenth-century fiction, shimmering with wit and artistic insight. This article considers a small selection of Austen’s earliest surviving fiction in order to demonstrate its centrality to understanding her lifelong subversive project.

Keywords: Jane Austen, juvenilia, Volume the First, parody, eighteenth-century fictio

Jane Austen’s writing is never more elliptical or indirect than in her talk about books, or, in other words, in her use of literary allusions. I see in Sanditon the culmination of a series of jokes about books that begin in the juvenilia, run through the mature novels, and flourish in this, her final unfinished work.

In this article, I discuss these allusions and jokes, focusing briefly on Austen’s completed novels and the Juvenilia before turning my attention to Sanditon to illustrate the development of Austen’s subversive comic technique. As numerous critics (among them Jocelyn Harris, Mary Waldron, Olivia Murphy, Isobel Grundy, Gillian Dow and myself) have suggested, Austen uses literary allusions in many ways: to denote character, to enter into the political, religious and cultural debates of her time, to undercut certainties, to mock, and to teach. In this discussion, I am most interested in those of her literary allusions that function subversively as jokes that demand an informed and receptive audience, that tip a sly wink to the reader that all may not be as it seems, and that thus often reveal Austen to us at her most acerbic and ironic. Like all Austen’s jokes, however, her jokes about books have a serious dimension, and I argue that the books that Sir Edward Denham claims not to read – “vapid tissues of ordinary occurrences” – have an important metaphorical resonance, not just in Sanditon, but throughout Austen’s oeuvre.

Keywords: Jane Austen, Sanditon, reading, readers, allusions, books, style, jokes, comic technique, gender.

This paper argues that Jane Austen is a satirist by likening her to James Gillray. Gillray, like Austen, is and was both a popular, pleasing artist and an ambiguous one, hard to read politically: Was he harder on Fox or Pitt? Here I compare a couple of characteristic Gillray images with Austen’s works, showing they have stylistic affinities to Austen’s style. Through an analysis of Sense and Sensibility, this paper argues that by satirising the ruling class in her society, Jane Austen – like Gillray – portrayed some human creatures as monsters.

Keywords: caricature, character, Austen, Gillray.

This article casts new light on Austen’s deployment of manners as an ideological mainstay in her fictional universe and, concurrently, on her uses of Englishness. It considers how her output explores manners not only in relation to individuals or social groups, but also from a national perspective – that is, national characters as imaginary structures of collective identity and agency. Starting from the eighteenth-century discourse on the characters and manners of nations, this article examines how Austen addressed, questioned and, in some important respects, subverted constructions of national manners and, especially, ideas of a monolithic and regimented Englishness. It demonstrates that, though Englishness was an indisputable fact for the novelist, her fiction represents it as both cohesive and multiple, as well as endowed with negative or positive connotations that may be either identified with or rejected. Stemming from this subversive engagement, Austen’s Englishness appears a more irregular, multifaceted and mutable category than the novelist is credited for by commonplace celebrations of her fiction as a shrine to a seemingly fixed, quintessentially English character.

Keywords: identity, manners, character, Englishness.

Both the intertextual relationship between Lovers’ Vows and Mansfield Park and Patricia Rozema’s cinematic adaptation of Austen’s novel have been the object of intense critical scrutiny. The purpose of this paper is to examine them together as belonging to a hypertextual continuum that stretches from Elizabeth Inchbald’s comedy to Rozema’s postmodern filmic pastiche. From this perspective, Austen’s text will be considered as the centre of a network of transmediatic relationships where meaning and representation undergo successive re-adaptations across three centuries as well as across the boundaries between different genres and media. The paper will discuss, in particular, the ways in which the three authors have engaged with generic conventions, social norms, and their ‘sources’ in order to refashion their representation of female characters and gender dynamics. On one hand this approach will shed new light on Austen’s own intertextual practices and the subtle dialectics she establishes with Inchbald by questioning and revising the thematic, ideological, and formal features of different genres, while on the other hand it will allow a fresh understanding of the ways in which Rozema’s film re-articulates the contrast between the “two heroines” of Mansfield Park and their relationship to male desire and authority.

Keywords: theatricals, Mansfield Park, Lovers’ Vows, comedy, film adaptation.

The term “world cinema”, derived from the more popular “world music”, is traditionally used to indicate “other” film industries, set in “other” countries, inhabiting “other” cultures. Or, to simplify, all that is “non-Hollywood cinema” (Nagib 2006: 30). With the term “World Austen” the present essay wishes to indicate those film appropriations (non-British and non-Hollywood) which translated Austen’s plots and characters into other cultures. Over the last century, Austen has become “a commodity, an industry, a corporation, and a celebrity” (Dryden 2013: 103), renowned all over the world, globalised, canonised and modernised.

The article will focus on three films, all modernisations of Austen’s two most popular novels: Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. Even though these films were produced in North America, they do not belong to the Hollywood world: they embody “other” cultures and mindsets and look at Austen from different perspectives. In Utah, Mollywood, the film industry of the Mormon church, appropriated Austen with two adaptations: Pride and Prejudice: A Latter-Day Comedy (2003) and Scents and Sensibility (2011) while a Latino remediation of Sense and Sensibility set in Los Angeles was released in 2011 with the title From Prada to Nada. The analysis will focus on the way these adaptations re-elaborate the textual material using it, as will be explained, as textual archetypes (Eco 1987: 2000), suitable for embodying stories about local society and providing teachings to the inhabitants of those cultures. The article will draw attention to how the Austenian “memes” (Dawkins 2006: 192) “travel to different cultures and different media” (Hutcheon 2013: 31) sometimes adapting to the new environment and, at other times, recovering their original essence. The paper will then analyse the mutation or the permanence of these memes, highlighting the common themes of female empowerment and the preservation of traditional values.

Keywords: Austen, cinema, adaptation, Mormon, Mexican-American, empowerment, morality, archetype, meme, tradition.

Many contemporary writers have made numerous editorial attempts at re-writing, re-mediating, and re-creating Jane Austen’s novels. However, along with the many sequels, prequels, mash-ups, film adaptations, blogs, and games created about her world and characters, we have also arrived at a new representation of Austen as a subversive novelist in a modern society. This article discusses how the contemporary writer Michael Thomas Ford represents Jane Austen’s subversiveness through the pages of his novel, Jane Bites Back (2010). Here, the English Regency writer is turned into a modern American girl: an aspiring novelist and owner of a bookshop in a small village in the state of New York, and a vampire. In Ford’s novel, the interactive dynamic between writer and readers is re-mediated, culminating in a new relationship between reader, modern writer and the cult of celebrity, creating new practices which situate both character and writer in a modern and complex society haunted by the desire for fulfillment both as professional writer and as vampire.

Keywords: Jane Austen, Austenmania, remediation, popular culture, celebrity.

In this essay, I examine Jane Austen’s restraint in attributing direct speech to its speakers in Pride and Prejudice, a matter on which she reflected explicitly in a letter to her sister, Cassandra. I connect this feature of Austen’s writing – free direct speech – with the dramatic qualities of her dialogue, but also specifically with Robert Bage’s presentation of speech in his 1796 novel Hermsprong, a novel that Austen owned. The political dimensions of Bage’s dialogue, its freedom in the discussion of ideas and its subtle omissions of person, resonate with the style and spirit of Pride and Prejudice. Austen’s interest in free direct speech also bears upon her famed development in presenting the mind, in free indirect discourse.

Keywords: Hermsprong, dialogue, speech attribution, style.

Ask a reader in Britain or the US why one should read Jane Austen, and the answer will unfailingly contain at least a passing reference to irony; ask a non-specialised Italian reader, and that most elusive of rhetorical figures will probably make room for other, more reassuring qualities. Jane Austen’s novels, the Italian answer will run, are fascinating, highly polished, formally perfect representations of a fascinating, highly polished, formally perfect world: one goes to them in order to immerse oneself in the manners of a faraway age and place.

While irony and the representation of manners are not mutually exclusive – in fact, the ironic depiction of manners can be said to be one of Austen’s great strengths – this difference in emphasis reflects deep-seated notions of literature and language in the English-speaking world on the one hand, and Italy on the other. For most English-speaking readers, the primary aim of fiction is to entertain, even though different levels of aesthetic and linguistic complexity are allowed for within this general framework. In the Italian cultural system, by contrast, great novels are thought of primarily as repositories of useful information and timeless moral values, with fun being frowned upon as a mark of popular (i.e., lowbrow) culture. English canonical novels are therefore translated and adapted in accordance to the taste of a general readership that tends to equate seriousness with a moralising attitude, and elegance with a high register.

In this article, Morini looks at some Italian translations and refractions of Austen’s most popular and most light-hearted novel, Pride and Prejudice. By focusing on source passages that are arguably imbued with linguistic irony, the author demonstrates that most target versions tend to mute or erase all traces of non-literal meaning, thereby effectively aligning the novel with the “conservative” readings of Austen’s art.

Keywords: Jane Austen, translation, linguistic irony.