Librarian for English
Hyper-Concordance for Jane Austen
The Victorian Literary Studies Archive has produced an online Hyper-Concordance of words used in numerous works by many authors, including Jane Austen. Select one of her works from the drop down list, then run a search for any word used in the book to find out how many times and where it is used.
The resources on this guide will help you as you undertake research related to Austen this semester. This page includes information for finding Austen-related critical scholarship and biographical information. Use the other tabs in this guide to find resources for researching the reception history and publication history of Austen's works, locating digital projects centering Austen in some way, and more.
Finding Austen-related critical scholarship - Library databases
The MLA International Bibliography (MLAIB) indexes the broadest range of resources about literature in all languages. If a literary study of your novel or work exists, you will likely find it here. Not everything in the MLA Bibliography is full-text, meaning that you may only see a description of an article, rather than the text of the article. To get full text of an article, click on “Find article @ UVa Libraries”, or look up the journal title in Virgo, the library catalog. If the citation is for a book or an essay/chapter in a book, look for the book title in Virgo.
Oxford Bibliographies Online - the British and Irish Literature bibliography includes a very detailed list of Austen-related criticism in many topical areas. Do note that this bibliography was last updated in 2018, so may not include the most recent scholarship.
JSTOR includes older issues of scholarly journals, from their beginnings to 3-5 years ago, so this may be another good database to look for articles related to your novel or work. Articles in JSTOR should be full-text, if we subscribe to the journal.
Project MUSE includes searchable full text of nearly 600 scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, and more, mostly from North American university presses.
Finding print and ebooks - critical scholarship
Virgo is UVA Library's catalog. Search Virgo for scholarship about Woolf and her works. Use subject headings to help you find resources that meet your research needs. You can use a general subject to get started, like: Austen, Jane -- 1775-1817 -- Criticism and interpretation..
You can also run an advanced search and pair a search for Austen with a search for subjects that relate to themes/topics of interest. For example, you might search for a keyword of Austen and a subject of: Ethics in Literature, Love in Literature, Masculinity in Literature, Arts in Literature, etc.
Once you find a book that includes a subject heading that relates to your topic of interest, click on the subject heading in the item record to find other items marked with that subject.
Below are a few examples of some recent print books and ebooks that critically examine Austen and her works.
The Architecture of Space-Time in the Novels of Jane Austen by Call Number: Clemons PR4037 .K23 2018ISBN: 9783319900100Publication Date: 2018This book argues that there are recurrent spatiotemporal patterns and structures in six Jane Austen novels which constitute a source of enduring, if unconscious, pleasure. More precisely, the book contends that there are overlapping natural and cultural cycles which co-exist in a constantly transmuting space-time and which are counterpointed with the linearity of pivotal events that drive the plot forwards. This work examines the psychological relations to these space-time patterns of the characters, principally the heroines, focusing on the transformations of their emotional states which prompt linear leaps.
Jane Austen's Geographies by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in VirgoISBN: 9781351235334Publication Date: 2018When Jane Austen represented the ideal subject for a novel as "three or four families in a country village", rather than encouraging a narrow range of reference she may have meant that a tight focus was the best way of understanding the wider world. The essays in this collection research the historical significance of her many geographical references and suggest how contemporaries may have read them, whether as indications of the rapid development of national travel, or of Britain's imperial status, or as signifiers of wealth and social class, or as symptomatic of political fears and aspirations. Specifically, the essays consider the representation of colonial mail-order wives and naval activities in the Mediterranean, the worrisome nomadism of contemporary capitalism, the complexity of her understanding of the actual places in which her fictions are set, her awareness of and eschewal of contemporary literary conventions, and the burden of the Austen family's Kentish origins, the political implications of addresses in London and Northamptonshire. Skilful, detailed, and historically informed, these essays open domains of meaning in Austen's texts that have often gone unseen by later readers but which were probably available to her coterie readers and clearly merit much closer critical attention.
Jane Austen's Men: Rewriting Masculinity in the Romantic Era by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in VirgoISBN: 9781000075205Publication Date: 2019This book illuminates Jane Austen's exploration of masculinity through the courtship romance genre in the socially, politically and culturally turbulent Romantic era. Austen scrutinises, satirises, censures and ultimately rewrites dominant modes of masculinity through the courtship romance plot between her heroines and male protagonists. This book reveals that Austen pioneers and celebrates a new vision of masculinity that could complement the Romantic desire for agency, individualism and selfhood embodied in her heroines. Rewriting desirable masculinity as an internalised, psychologically complex and authentic gender identity - a model of manhood that drives the ongoing appeal and cultural power of her men in the twenty-first century - Austen explores both the challenges and the opportunities for male selfhood, romantic love and feminine agency. Jane Austen's Men is among the first full-length works to explore Austen's male protagonists as textual constructions of masculinity.
Jane Austen, Sex, and Romance: Engaging with Desire in the Novels and Beyond by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in VirgoISBN: 9781800106758Publication Date: Sept 2022Brings together a range of voices--from literary scholars to video game designers--to explore how different types of readers experience the realm of desire and the erotic in all things Austen. In this timely collection, writers, critics, journalists, and authors of internet content weigh in on sex and romance in Austen's works and in the conversations and creations the novels inspire--from sequels to critical analyses to online role-playing games. Contributors examine what is at stake for each set of Austen enthusiasts when Eros is added to the equation, in so doing building on the long tradition of Austen criticism and enriching our appreciation of the novels
Jane Austen: Writing, Society, Politics by Call Number: Clemons PR4037 .K49 2020ISBN: 9780198861904Publication Date: Oct 2020Jane Austen's books pioneered new techniques for representing voices, minds, and hearts in narrative prose, and, despite some accusations of a blinkered domestic and romantic focus, they represent the world of their characters with unsparing clarity. Here, Tom Keymer explores the major themes throughout Austen's novels, setting them in the literary, social, and political backgrounds from which they emerge, and showing how they engage with social tensions in an era dominated by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The Jane Austen who emerges is a writer shaped by the literary experiments and socio-political debates of her time, increasingly drawn to a fundamentally conservative vision of social harmony, yet forever complicating this vision through her disruptive ironies and satirical energy.
Jane Austen and Other Minds: Ordinary Language Philosophy in Literary Fiction by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in VirgoISBN: 9781009206990Publication Date: Oct 2022Eric Reid Lindstrom addresses a long-standing shortcoming of Austen scholarship by locating in her fiction a linguistic phenomenology available to the novelistic everyday but not afforded her in intellectual history. He simultaneously advances recognition and understanding of J. L. Austin and Stanley Cavell, and of ordinary language philosophy, within Austen scholarship and the broader field of contemporary literary studies. This book argues compellingly for Cavell's choice of Austen as a means to pursue 'passionate exchange,' reimagining her common association with restriction and confinement.
Jane Austen and Sciences of the Mind by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in VirgoISBN: 9781351401807Publication Date: 2018The essays in this volume interpret Jane Austen's fiction through the lens of various sciences of the mind and brain, especially the cluster of disciplines implicated in the term cognitive science, including neuroscience, evolutionary biology, evolutionary and developmental psychology, and others. The field of cognitive literary studies has rapidly developed in the last few decades and achieved the status of an established (if still evolving) critical approach. One of the most popular authors to analyze from this perspective is Jane Austen. As numerous critics have noted, Austen was a keen observer of how the mind operates in its interactions with other minds, both when it functions successfully and when, as often happens, it goes awry, and her perceptions are often in synch with current neuroscientific and psychological research. Despite the widespread recognition of the special congruity between Austen's novels and cognitive science, however, no book has been devoted to this subject. Jane Austen and Sciences of the Mind is the first monograph wholly comprised of readings of Austen's oeuvre (juvenilia as well as all six completed novels) from cognitive and related psychological approaches. In addition, the volume operates under the assumption that cognitive and historicist approaches are compatible, and many essays situate Austen within the climate of ideas during her era as well as in relation to current research in the sciences and social sciences. Jane Austen and Sciences of the Mind offers a new lens for understanding and illuminating the concerns, techniques, and enduring appeal of Austen's novels.
Finding biographical information about Austen, another author, an illustrator, or publisher
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) provides entries on the lives of British persons from the earliest times to the end of the 20th century.
Orlando: Women's Writing in the British Isles provides entries on authors' lives and writing careers, contextual material, timelines, sets of internal links, and bibliographies. Interacting with these materials creates a dynamic inquiry from any number of perspectives into centuries of women's writing.
Literature Resource Center (LRC) includes the full text of important literary reference works. Among them are articles from the Dictionary of Literary Biography, which is a terrific source for finding detailed biographies and profiles of authors, illustrators, publishers, and other literary figures. Run a search for a person's name and then choose the Biographies tab, if there are articles available (though other articles - critical or otherwise -- could be useful, too!)
There are also many book-length works on Austen and her friends, family, and associates. Find them using a Virgo catalog search. A few examples:
Jane Austen: A Life by Call Number: Clemons PR4036.T66 1997ISBN: 9780679446286Publication Date: 1997In an act of understanding and brilliant synthesis, Claire Tomalin reveals Jane Austen with a clarity never before achieved, one which makes us look upon her novels with fresh and even greater admiration. The world she wrote about--that place of civility and reassuring stability--was never quite her own. As Tomalin shows, Jane Austen's family existed on the very fringe of the world she described in her fiction, struggling to get ahead with little money and no land in the competitive society of Georgian England, sometimes succeeding but often failing with painful consequences. New research in family papers has yielded a rich, tragicomic picture of the Austen clan--their ambitions, their matrimonial alliances, their exotic connections with India and France. At the same time, Tomalin's explorations in local archives reveal a surprising view of the neighbors the family lived among in Hampshire, more extravagant and eccentric by far than anyone depicted in Austen's books. We realize how much closer her genius lies, in its splendid artifice, to the great comic operas of Mozart than to the main tradition of the English novel. But it is in the deeply human portrait of Jane Austen herself that this biography excels. The honesty and directness of her personality (perfect heroines made her "sick and wicked"), her strength in giving up a chance at marriage to follow the path her vocation as a writer required her to take, the warmth and long consistency of her relationship with her sister, Cassandra, the poignancy of her death--Claire Tomalin here captures, with unforgettable skill, the living character of a great writer who is read, reread, read again, and adored, now more than ever.
Jane Austen: A Family Record by Call Number: Fine Arts ND497 .B44 A4 2017ISBN: 9780521534178Publication Date: 2004All the documented facts concerning the novelist are collected in this detailed account of Jane Austen's life, background and literary career. Her role within an affectionate and talented family group is described in the Austens' own words, showing how Jane was valued as daughter, sister, aunt and friend. The book demonstrates how Jane transformed the details of her peaceful life in the Hampshire countryside, along with the wartime careers of her brothers, into six novels that are among the most popular in the English language.
Jane Austen at Home: A Biography by Call Number: PR4036.W67 2017ISBN: 9781250131607Publication Date: 2017Take a trip back to Jane Austen's world and the many places she lived as historian Lucy Worsley visits Austen's childhood home, her schools, her holiday accommodations, the houses--both grand and small--of the relations upon whom she was dependent, and the home she shared with her mother and sister towards the end of her life. In places like Steventon Parsonage, Godmersham Park, Chawton House and a small rented house in Winchester, Worsley discovers a Jane Austen very different from the onewho famously lived a 'life without incident'. Worsley examines the rooms, spaces and possessions which mattered to her, and the varying ways in which homes are used in her novels as both places of pleasure and as prisons. She shows readers a passionate Jane Austen who fought for her freedom, a woman who had at least five marriage prospects, but--in the end--a woman who refused to settle for anything less than Mr. Darcy. Illustrated with two sections of color plates, Lucy Worsley'sJane Austen at Home is a richly entertaining and illuminating new book about one of the world's favorite novelists and one of the subjects she returned to over and over in her unforgettable novels: home.
Jane Austen's 'Outlandish Cousin': The Life and Letters of Eliza de Feuillide by Call Number: Clemons DA506.D34 L44 2002ISBN: 9780712347624Publication Date: 2002Eliza de Feuillide is best known as the spirited first cousin of Jane Austen whose colourful life and travels are recounted through her extensive correspondence with Jane, the Austen family, and other friends and relatives. Born in Calcutta in 1761, she spent an impecunious childhood in England and then France, where she married an aristocratic French Officer and lived through the Revolution, surviving her husband, who was guillotined in 1794. Many of Eliza's letters vividly illuminate the lives of Jane Austen and her family, as well as revealing the wider world against which Austen's novels are set. The letters were never intended for publication and are all the more revealing for being long before Jane became a well-known authoress. This new biography collects all the surviving letters, providing many valuable new insights into the background to Jane Austen's novels as well as being a highly entertaining social and historical record in its own right.
Jane Austen's Letters (4th ed) by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in Virgo (also in print)ISBN: 9780199576074Publication Date: 2011Jane Austen's letters afford a unique insight into the daily life of the novelist: intimate and gossipy, observant and informative--they read much like the novels themselves. They bring alive her family and friends, her surroundings and contemporary events, all with a freshness unparalleled in modern biographies. Most important, we recognize the unmistakable voice of the author of such novels as Pride and Prejudice and Emma. We see the shift in her writing from witty and amusing descriptions of the social life of town and country, to a thoughtful and constructive tone while writing about the business of literary composition. R.W. Chapman's ground-breaking edition of the collected letters first appeared in 1932, and a second edition followed twenty years later. A third edition, edited Deirdre Le Faye in 1997 added new material, re-ordered the letters into their correct chronological sequence, and provided discreet and full annotation to each letter, including its provenance, and information on the watermarks, postmarks, and other physical details of the manuscripts. This new fourth edition incorporates the findings of recent scholarship to further enrich our understanding of Austen and give us the fullest and most revealing view yet of her life and family. In addition, Le Faye has written a new preface, has amended and updated the biographical and topographical indexes, has introduced a new subject index, and had added the contents of the notes to the general index.
