Wednesday, June 06, 2012

For readers of Jane Austen


University of Auckland Centre for Continuing Education

Jane Austen: Past and Present

University of Auckland academics Janine Barchas and Joanne Wilkes will offer two different contexts for reading Austen.
Dr. Barchas will focus on the Austen's own Georgian era, detailing the economic realities of "200 a year" and revealing that Austen plucks names for her protagonists from the family trees of genuine Regency celebrities. Dr. Wilkes will track Austen's critical reception across the centuries.
Session detail
Session ID:102913
Schedule:1 morning, Saturday 9 June, 9.30am - 12.30pm
Fee (GST incl):
Coupon Code:How do I get my coupon code?
Tutor detail
Tutor:Joanne Wilkes
Qualifications:BA (Hons), Sydney, DPhil. Oxford
Biography:Joanne Wilkes has taught in the English Department since 1987. Her work focuses on nineteenth-century literature, and her first book was on Austen's Persuasion. Her most recent book is Women Reviewing Women in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Critical Reception of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot (Ashgate, 2010). She has a particular interest in the reception history of Jane Austen.
Tutor:Janine Barchas
Qualifications:BA, PhD
Biography:Janine Barchas joined the University of Texas at Austin in 2002, after teaching at The University of Auckland for five years. She is currently back teaching here for a semester on an academic exchange. Her book, Matters of Fact in Jane Austen: History, Location, and Celebrity will be published by Johns Hopkins University Press in August. Ongoing projects include a website entitled "What Jane Saw" that reconstructs a museum visit attended by the Austens in 1813, as well as an investigation into the marketing of Jane Austen through book cover art from 1833 to the present.
Facility detail
Name:Room J3, J Block, Epsom Campus (access via Gate 3)
Address:74 Epsom Avenue
City:Auckland
Zip:1023

Course outline

This is a three-hour seminar that looks at the canonical and popular literary figure Jane Austen from two perspectives. Georgian culture specialist Janine Barchas draws on research for her forthcoming book to contextualise Austen in her own period, discussing in particular the way Austen used, for many characters, family names known to herself and her contemporaries. Thus she enhanced the associations readers could have brought to the novels, associations largely lost to modern readers. She also discusses the economic realities faced by people of the classes Austen writes about. Joanne Wilkes deploys her knowledge of the reception history of Austen's novels to outline the varying ways in which they have been received over the past two centuries. She covers both critics and other readers - showing how Austen has been reinvented for each generation, in line with its own attitudes and priorities.

Learning outcomes

Learners will gain an enhanced understanding of the works of one of the most famous British writers - how she can be related closely to her own time, and how her works have aroused a range of critical and popular responses in the two centuries since.

Who should attend?

Readers of Jane Austen

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