The History Civil And Ecclesiastical Survey Of The Antiquities Of Winchester By The Rev John Milner

Author : Freya Johnston
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691198004
Total Pages : 290 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (911 download)

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Download or read book Jane Austen, Early and Late written by Freya Johnston and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-09 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Jane Austen's six novels, published toward the end of her short life, represent a body of work that is as brilliant as it is compact. Her earlier writings have routinely been dismissed as mere juvenilia, or stepping stones to mature proficiency and greatness. Austen's first biographer described them as "childish effusions." Was he right to do so? Can the novels be definitively separated from the unpublished works? In Jane Austen, Early and Late, Freya Johnston argues that they cannot. Examining the three manuscript volumes in which Austen collected her earliest writings, Johnston finds that Austen's regard and affection for them are revealed by her continuing to revisit and revise them throughout her adult life. The teenage works share the milieu and the humour of the novels, while revealing more clearly the sources and influences upon which Austen drew. Johnston upends the conventional narrative, according to which Austen discarded the satire and fantasy of her first writings in favour of the irony and realism of the novels. By demonstrating a stylistic and thematic continuity across the full range of Austen's work, Johnston asks whether it makes sense to speak of an early and a late Austen at all."--Provided by publisher.