Jane Austen's Art of Memory offers a radical new thesis about Jane Austen's construction of her art. It argues that, with the help of her tenacious memory, she engaged in friendly dialogue with her predecessors, the English writers, a process that the eighteenth century called 'imitation'. Her allusions, far from being random, thicken and complicate her novels in a manner that is poetic rather than mimetic. Difficult critical cruxes resolve when her books are set within her own great tradition which included Locke, Richardson, Milton, Shakespeare, and (unexpectedly) Chaucer, and she is found to be an educated and supremely conscious writer.
| ISBN: | 9780521542074 |
| Publication date: | 28th August 2003 |
| Author: | Jocelyn Harris |
| Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Pagination: | 284 pages |
| Genres: |
Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 |