A escritora inglesa Jane Austen possui, além do status de autora canônica, um apelo popular não apenas em função de sua qualidade como escritora, mas também pela força imagética de suas obras quando adaptadas para o cinema. Em Amor e Inocência (2007), o diretor Julian Jarrold apresenta um episódio ocorrido na vida da autora, com base em fatos extraídos da biografia Becoming Jane Austen, escrita em 2003 por Jon Spence. O filme explora um possível envolvimento entre a jovem Jane e o estudante irlandês Tom Lefroy. Essa produção, enquanto apresenta o início da carreira da escritora, sugere que o trauma da relação mal sucedida com Lefroy possa ter sido a fonte temática que inspirou sua obra ficcional posterior. Esta dissertação verifica de que forma o filme articula as questões históricas sobre a vida de Austen com as situações ficcionais apresentadas em seus romances para chegar a um produto final tão coeso e verossímil, embora ficcional. Especial atenção é dada ao estudo da construção da personagem protagonista, que resulta da combinação entre o conteúdo imagético das obras de Austen e os elementos biográficos pesquisados por Spence. Além dessas fusões, há ainda que ser considerado o ícone Jane Austen, que habita o imaginário dos ingleses e dos leitores pelo mundo afora. Na evolução das adaptações fílmicas das obras de Austen testemunhamos a fusão entre as personagens e a própria autora, especialmente no caso de Elizabeth Bennet, em Orgulho e Preconceito (1813). Para realizar esta análise, lanço mão dos conceitos de adaptação e apropriação propostos por Linda Hutcheon, e do conceito de metaficção historiográfica estabelecido pela mesma autora em A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (1988). Ao término do trabalho, espero que esta discussão investigativa e argumentativa seja útil em três aspectos: contribuindo para o debate sobre autores usados como personagens na ficção derivativa contemporânea; identificando certas necessidades culturais que subjazem ao culto do ícone Jane Austen, conhecido como Austenmania; e verificando até que ponto o conceito de metaficção historiográfica dá conta de propostas narrativas em que a personagem histórica retratada é também uma escritora. / Jane Austen enjoys more than the status of canonical author: she is also popular not only because of her achievements as a writer but also for the cinematic appeal of her novels. In Becoming Jane (2007), director Julian Jarrold presents the story of Jane Austen from an episode occurred early in the author’s life. Based on facts extracted from Jon Spence’s biography Becoming Jane Austen (2003), the film explores a supposed relationship between young Jane and an Irish Law student, Tom Lefroy. In Becoming Jane we witness the beginning of Austen’s writing career, and the film speculates that the trauma of a failed relationship with Lefroy was the inspiration for Austen’s mature novels. This work verifies the ways in which the film articulates the historical aspects of Jane Austen’s life with fictional events as presented in her novels to reach a cohesive and credible – although fictional – result. Special attention is paid to the process of constructing a fictional Jane as main character, combining the images contained in her novels with the biographical elements presented by Spence; it is also considered in this analysis the evolving nature of Jane Austen as an icon that inhabits not only the English imaginary but also that of readers all over the world. In the evolution of Austen filmic adaptations, we witness a fusion between her characters and the author herself, especially Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice (1813), which adds to the intertextual layers of any film analysis. To deal with the questions of film adaptations, I refer to the concepts of adaptation and appropriation as posed by theoretician Linda Hutcheon. For the specific analysis of the phenomenon of author as character, I turn again to Linda Hutcheon and the concept of historiographic metafiction presented in A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (1988). I hope, by the end of this thesis, that this investigative and argumentative analysis is helpful in three instances: contributing to the discussion of the use of authors as characters in contemporary fiction, be it filmic or literary; identifying the cultural needs of readers and critics that perpetuate the cult of Jane Austen, known as Austenmania; and verifying to what extent historiographic metafiction alone is enough to deal with narratives in which the historical character portrayed is also a writer.

A Romantic Bildung: The Development of Coming-of-Age Novels in the Romantic Period (1782-1817) explore la naissance et le développement du roman de formation en Europe à l’époque romantique. Celle-ci est le témoin de nombreuses discussions sur les Droits de l’homme et de la montée du nationalisme en Europe. Au même moment, la littérature se transforme pour laisser plus de place à la subjectivité du personnage. Tout cela donne naissance à un nouveau genre littéraire : le Bildungsroman, ou roman de formation et d’éducation. Contrairement à la définition actuelle du genre, le Bildungsroman est transnational, c’est-à-dire qu’il ne provient pas exclusivement d’Allemagne, mais de partout en Europe. A Romantic Bildung se penche donc sur le sujet en analysant de façon thématique la trame narrative de Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress (1782), Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle (1788), Mansfield Park (1814), Waverley; or, 'Tis Sixty Years Since (1814), Emma (1815), ainsi que d’Ormond, a Tale (1817) et sur leur appartenance au roman de l’époque romantique. En comparant les étapes d’éducation, d’indépendance, et de retour à la société des protagonistes, ces romans font ressortir les similitudes qui caractérisent le Bildungsroman. / A Romantic Bildung: The Development of Coming-of-Age Novels in the Romantic Period (1782-1817) explores the birth and development of the Bildungsroman during the Romantic period. The latter is characterized by the numerous discourses on the Rights of men as well as the rise of nationalism. At the same time, Romantic writers transform literature by increasing the protagonist’s subjectivity and in turns, create a new genre of narrative: the Bildungsroman, in which the protagonist’s development and growth is the main focus. Contrary to current definition of the genre, the Bildungsroman—or coming-of-age novel—is a transnational product: it is obviously found in Germany, but also in France, England, Ireland, and Scotland, to name a few, during the Romantic period. Through a thematic analysis of Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress (1782), Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle (1788), Mansfield Park (1814), Waverley; or, 'Tis Sixty Years Since (1814), Emma (1815), and Ormond, A Tale (1815), A Romantic Bildung traces the narrative structure of the genre and it locates its essence in the Romantic novel. By comparing the narrative’s steps of education, independence, and return to society, the characteristics of the genre are revealed.

S’appuyant sur la philosophie de la femme de Mary Wollstonecraft et sur celle de l’enfance de John Locke, ce mémoire examine « l’effet de l’éducation » (Austen 211) sur les relations filiales dans le roman Mansfield Park de Jane Austen. Austen, comme de nombreux romanciers et auteurs de livres de conduite de son époque, aborde l’état de l’éducation au début du XIXe siècle. Refusant les carcans genrés dans lesquels sont généralement cloîtrés les individus dès l’enfance, l’éducation, telle qu’elle est présentée par Austen, se concentre sur l’acquisition de la raison et de la vertu et implique, par conséquent, l’épanouissement de l’individu, le développement d’une conscience identitaire et un apprentissage qui se prolonge tout au long de la vie, ce qui amène l’individu à forger des liens interpersonnels forts avec autrui. Vivant au sein d’une société en mouvement, Austen observe également les implications de l’apprentissage social sur l’individu et ses relations. Le premier chapitre traite de l’éducation familiale et examine les façons dont divers types d’apprentissage contribuent à la formation de l’identité et en viennent à déterminer les relations interindividuelles. Ce chapitre compare et met également en contraste la conception de l’éducation d’Austen avec celle de Wollstonecraft et de Locke. Le deuxième chapitre s’intéresse à la relation interdépendante entre l’individu, la famille et la société, et présente dans quelle mesure les dynamiques de pouvoir à l’échelle individuelle et sociale déterminent les relations interpersonnelles. Ce chapitre se concentre sur l’inégalité et l’oppression inhérentes au colonialisme britannique, à l’esclavage et à l’assujettissement des femmes au début du XIXe siècle, qui entravent le développement de liens profonds entre les individus, comme le montre le roman. / Drawing on Mary Wollstonecraft’s and John Locke’s philosophies of female and childhood education, respectively, this thesis examines “the effect of education” (Austen 211) on kinship ties in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. Like many novelists and writers of conduct books during her lifetime, Austen addresses the state of education in the early nineteenth century. She proposes a more gender-neutral education that revolves around reason and virtue, like Locke and Wollstonecraft, and involves personal development and lifelong learning, which allows the individual to develop a sense of self and consequently form strong interpersonal bonds. Inhabiting a society undergoing rapid transformations, Austen also discusses the influence of social learning on the individual and their relationships. The first chapter addresses childhood education within the home and family and examines the ways various types of learning are instrumental to identity formation and determine relationships. This chapter also compares and contrasts Austen’s conception of education with Wollstonecraft’s and Locke’s. The second chapter considers the interdependent relationship between the individual, the family, and society and discusses in which respect power dynamics in home and country determine interpersonal relations. This chapter focuses on the inequality and oppression inherent in British colonialism, slavery, and female subjugation in the early nineteenth century, which hinder the development of profound attachments between individuals, as shown in the novel.

The presented master thesis deals with the work of Jane Austen. The author's novels are analysed from the perspective of the concept of the family, both from a literary and demographic point of view. These research questions constitutes two subject of the examination. The first subject is the family, as it is the cornerstone of Jane Austen's short stories. The objective of this work is to analyse the extent to which family relationships determine the possibilities of the main characters and heroines; how the heroines benefit from family ties or, on the contrary, want to escape from them. The conclusions show that Austen applied this determination in all studied novels. This work further examines the degree of cooperation and rivalry of the individual families in the novels. At this point, a significant diversity of interfamily relationships was found. Secondly, this work maps selected demographic idiosyncrasies in Jane Austen's family, in the families from her short stories, and in historical demographic studies of England at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. This thesis focuses on the number and composition of individual families, their origin, social status, property relations and to some extent legal relationships, mainly related to the issue of inheritance and the situation of widows in...

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Historian David Bell recently suggested that scholars reconsider the impact of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815) upon modern culture, naming them the first "total war" in modern history. My thesis explores the significance of the wars specifically in the British mourning culture of the period by studying the war literature of four women writers: Anna Letitia Barbauld, Amelia Opie, Jane Austen, and Felicia Hemans. This paper further asks how these authors contributed to the development of a national consciousness studied by Georg Lukács, Benedict Anderson, and others. I argue that women had a representative experience of non-combatants' struggle to mourn war deaths occurring in relatively foreign lands and circumstances. Women writers recorded and contributed to this representative experience that aided the development of a national consciousness in its strong sense of shared anxieties and grief for soldiers. Excluded physically and experientially, women would have had an especially difficult time attempting to mourn combatant deaths while struggling to imagine the places and manners in which those deaths occurred, especially when no physical bodies came home to "testify" of their loved ones' experiences. Women writers' literary portraits of imagined women mourning those whose bodies never came home provide interesting insights into the strategies employed during the grieving process and ultimately demonstrate their contribution to a collective British consciousness based on mourning. The questions I explore in the first section of this thesis circle around the idea of women as writers and mourners: What were writers saying about war, death, and mourning? What common themes begin to appear in the women's Romantic war literature? And, perhaps most importantly, how did such mourning literature affect the growing sense of nationality coming out of this period? In the second section, I consider more precisely how these literary contributions affected mourning culture when no bodies were present for burial and advanced the development of a national consciousness that recognized the wars' "nobodies." How did women's experiences of being left behind and marginalized in the war efforts prepare them to conceptualize destructive mass deaths abroad, and, conceptualizing them, to mourn them?

In recent decades there have been many attempts to pull Austen into the fold of high Romantic literature. On one level, these thematic comparisons are useful, for Austen has long been anachronistically treated as separate from the Romantic tradition. In the past, her writings have essentially straddled Romantic classification, labeled either as hangers-on in the satiric eighteenth-century literary tradition or as early artifacts of a kind of proto-Victorianism. To a large extent, scholars have described Austen as a writer departing from, rather than embracing, the literary trends of the Romantic era. Yet, while recent publications depicting a “Romantic Austen” yield impressive insights into the timeliness of her fiction, they haven't fully addressed Austen's participation in some of the most crucial literary debates of her time. Thus, it is my intention in this essay to extend the discussion of Austen as a Romantic to her participation in Romantic-era debates over emergent literary categories of authorship and realism. I argue that we can best contextualize Austen by examining how her model of authorship differs from those that surfaced in literary conversations of the time, particularly those relating to the high Romantic myth of the solitary genius. Likewise, as questions of solitary authorship often overlap with discussions of realism and romance in literature, it is important to reexamine how Austen responds to these categories, particularly in the context of a strictly Romantic engagement with these terms. I find that, though Austen's writing has long been implicated in the emergence of realism in literature, little has been written to link this impulse to the earlier emergence of Romantic-era categories of authorship and literary creativity. I contend that Austen's self-projection (as both an author and realist) engages with Romantic-era literary debates over these categories; likewise, I argue that her response to these emergent concerns is more complex and nuanced than has heretofore been accounted for in literary scholarship.

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There are many factors that contributed to the proliferation of visual codes, metaphors and references to the gendered gaze in women's fiction of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. This thesis argues that the visual details in women's novels published between 1778 and 1815 are more significant than scholars have previously acknowledged. My analysis of the oeuvres of Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth and Fanny Burney shows that visuality — the nexus between the verbal and visual communication — provided them with a language within language capable of circumventing the cultural strictures on female expression in a way that allowed for concealed resistance. It conveyed the actual ways in which women ‘should' see and appear in a society in which the reputation was image-based. My analysis journeys through physiognomic, psychological, theatrical and codified forms of visuality to highlight the multiplicity of its functions. I engage with scholarly critiques drawn from literature, art, optics, psychology, philosophy and anthropology to assert visuality's multidisciplinary influences and diplomatic potential. I show that in fiction and in actuality, women had to negotiate four scopic forces that determined their ‘looks' and manners of looking: the impartial spectator, the male gaze, the public eye and the disenfranchised female gaze. In a society dominated by ‘frustrated utterance,' penetrating gazes and the perpetual threat of misinterpretation, women novelists used references to the visible and the invisible to comment on emotions, socio-economic conditions and patriarchal abuses. This thesis thus offers new insights into verbal economy by reassessing expression and perception from an unconventional point-of-view.

In this studyi apply a feminist-narratological grid to the works under discussion. I show how narration is used as strategy to highlight issues of concern to women, hereby attempting to make a contribution in the relatively new field of feminist narratology. Chapter One provides an analysis of Pride and Prejudice as an example of a feminist statement by Jane Austen. The use of omniscient narration and its ironic possibilities are offset against the central characters' perceptions, presented by means of free indirect style. Chapter Two examines The Tenant of Wildfell Hall as a critique of Wuthering Heights, both in its use of narrative frames and in its at times moralistic comment. The third and fourth chapters focus on Charlotte Bronte. Her ambivalences about the situation of women, be they writers, narrators or characters, are explored. These are seen to be revealed in her narrative strategies, particularly in her attainment of closure, or its lack. Chapter Five explores the increasing sophistication of the narrative techniques of Elizabeth Gaskell, whose early work Mary Barton is shown to have narrative inconsistencies as opposed to her more complex last novel Wives and Daughters. Finally, I conclude that while the authors under discussion use divergent methods, certain commonalities prevail. Among these are the presentation of alternatives women have within their constraining circumstances and the recognition of their moral accountability for the choices they make. / English Studies / D. Litt. et Phil. (English)