Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture is about Jane Austen and her most popular novel, Pride and Prejudice. I discuss Austen’s biography; her place in the history of the novel; her posthumous reception by skeptical Romantics, hostile radicals, appreciative humanists, and realist and modernist novelists; the complex class system underlying her fiction; her characteristic irony and use of free indirect style; her hostility to “mimetic desire”; her creation of a perfectly flawed heroine in need of Bildung; her vision of class mobility and class reconciliation through the literal wedding of middle-class female emotional literacy to aristocratic male judgment and power; her valuation of nature and art; her ambition for the novel to play a leading ethical role in society; and the way her novels make moral self-knowledge newly available to modern audiences. The first 15 minutes are free; please offer a paid subscription for the rest. Please enjoy! The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded below the paywall.
Listen to this episode with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Grand Hotel Abyss to listen to this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.
