L'hypothèse à la source ce mémoire est que, dans le roman Emma, Jane Austen nous place devant le problème de l'incomplétude humaine et suggère que sa meilleure solution réside en une relation amoureuse fondée dans l'amitié vertueuse. Notre premier chapitre montre, en relevant les erreurs que commet Emma dans ses liens avec ses trois amies et trois amants, les conséquences néfastes d'un aveuglement sur la finalité naturelle de l'être humain, qui a besoin d'autrui pour se perfectionner et atteindre le bonheur. Notre second chapitre analyse et hiérarchise trois solutions offertes dans Emma au problème de l'incomplétude. Il conclut que le couple Knightley, qui est fondé dans une estime réciproque et un souci mutuel de rectitude morale et intellectuelle, incarne la forme supérieure de sociabilité humaine: ce couple est en mesure de s'entraider, de s'entr'éduquer et de s'entreconnaître, ce qui comble au mieux l'incomplétude qui est le lot de l'humanité.

This doctoral thesis analyses the evolution of responses to Jane Austen's fiction through continuations of her unfinished novel The Watsons (c.1803-5). Although the first full “appropriation” of an Austen novel ever published was a continuation of The Watsons and a total of eight completions appeared between 1850 and 2008, little research has been done to link the afterlife of The Watsons and changing perceptions of Austen. This thesis argues that the completions of The Watsons significantly illuminate Austen's reception: they expose conflicting readings of Austen's novels through textual negotiations between the completer's and Austen's voice. My study begins by examining how the first continuation, Catherine Hubback's The Younger Sister (1850), implies an alternative image of the Victorian Austen to that propounded by James Edward Austen-Leigh, Austen's first official biographer (Chapter 1). The next two chapters focus on the effects of World War I and II on modes of reading Austen. Through L. Oulton's (1923), Edith Brown's (1928) and John Coates's (1958) completions of The Watsons, this study examines the connection between Austen's fiction and different notions of Englishness, politics and the nation. Chapter Four addresses the contribution of the 1990s completions to the debate over Austen's feminism. Finally, Chapter Five analyses recent trends in Austenalia, which thwart the production of successful completions of The Watsons. My thesis presents the first substantial analysis of this body of work.

In Jane Austen’s Emma, Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey there is a central theme of finding a marriage partner from economic, social and love perspectives. The focus of this essay is to look from a materialist feminist perspective at how these factors influence the characters’ marital matches. I have also looked at how love as a sought after ideal in marriage conceals the social and economic factors’ influence. The novels all discuss how women’s marginalized economic position forces them to marry. Social factors such as women’s need to find a husband and their expected domestic role have also had an influence. Love works in the novels to support the oppression of women by justifying marriage and concealing women’s unequal role in society.

Det huvudsakliga syftet med min uppsats var att utifrån originalverket Emma (1815) avJane Austen kunna bedöma vad två verk som inspirerats av romanen bör klassificeras som.De två verken var romanen Amanda (2006) av författaren Debra White Smith ochspelfilmen Clueless (1995) av regissören Amy Heckerling. Till min hjälp har jag lästaktuell forskning inom de två termerna adaption och fanfiction och utifrån detta gjort enjämförande analys på verken. Resultatet blev oväntat vagt, det visade sig att begreppen lågnärmre varandra än vad jag trott från början. Båda verken kan till viss del ses som enadaption på originalverket, på samma sätt som de även kan ses som fanfiction. Slutsatsenär dock att de båda verken passar bäst in under termen profic, som är en underkategoriinom fanfiction där författaren/regissören tjänar pengar på sin modifikation och intepublicerat verket i exempelvis ett obetalt nätforum som hobbyaktivitet.

This study examines Jane Austen’s realistic interpretations of eighteenth-century English society with a particular focus on representing women’s oppressions in Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma. Austen, in these three novels, criticizes several issues related to women’s status in English society and focuses on how men and women should be treated equally. In the novels, she argues that English society creates social order, women’s oppressiveness, and gender inequality through arbitrary social norms and traditions. This paper mainly focuses on two areas that restrict women’s roles in their society: the marriage plot and the educational system. Austen’s purpose of presenting these issues is to voice women’s rights and improve their conditions. She also offers her readers unusual descriptions of female characters in order to correct the stereotypical images of women during the period. Finally, this paper aims to show Austen’s success in redefining women’s status and change the misconceptions of women in British society.

Thesis advisor: Susan Michalczyk / In nineteenth-century England, women were struggling to find an outlet for the intelligence, emotions, and creativity that the patriarchal society around them continuously stifled. For women such as Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, writing served as an opportunity to defy restrictive social structures and offered a needed public voice. By expressing their own thoughts and frustrations, Austen and Brontë helped to overcome the anonymity imposed upon women of their time, as they illuminated the female experience. The following paper takes a look at the ways in which Austen and Brontë imparted autobiographical elements to their female characters, as both authors underwent important catharses and inspired the women around them. To this day, their literature provides critical insight into the troubled existence of the nineteenth-century woman, while revealing their own struggles with their constricted identities. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2004. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

The aim of this Master’s thesis is to investigate the modern Swedishreader’s possibilities to understand the literary allusions in Jane Austen’sfirst three novels in light of young people’s decreasing readingand understanding of classic literature. This is done by examining historicaloverviews of literature written in Swedish, curriculums forliterature courses at three Swedish universities and library holdings inSwedish libraries, both public and academic.In the thesis three different elements are combined – informationabout the alluded authors and texts, a comparison between the Swedishand the English versions of the novels and the result from theabove mentioned investigation. The description of the alluded authorsand texts provide information about the connotations that can be madeby an allusion to them. The comparison between the English and theSwedish novels show whether or not the allusions still exists in thetranslated text and if there are any differences that might affect theunderstanding of the novels.The theoretical framework is based upon literary sociology, especiallythe work of Escarpit. His concept creative treason is an inspiration forthe thesis. The hermeneutic theory of understanding is also consulted.That previous understanding effect the interpretation of a text is afundamental idea upon which the importance of the three chosen resources(curriculums, historical overviews of literature, library holdings)are based. / Program: Bibliotekarie

The eighteenth-century female of sensibility was characterized by delicate nerves that allowed her to feel her surroundings and enabled her to choose virtue over vice more consistently than males. While females were considered virtuous, their "innate" delicacy or weakness became their dominant trait and the true focus of male admiration. Although critics have already observed that Jane Austen's novels work against this idealization of feminine weakness, not one has recognized exactly how Austen transforms the female of sensibility tradition. Austen dissociates a female's delicacy from her virtue, making the primary source of virtue intellect and, in doing so, relocates male desire on to a female's inner self. Her novels work in progression to achieve this goal. Sense and Sensibility exposes delicacy's negative effects. Subsequent novels transform the sensibility tradition using two strategies. In Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park, several relationships demonstrate the different ways a dissociation and relocation can occur. Emma and Persuasion employ the second strategy: the problem of illusion. The existence of a weak female as attractive proves only to be delusive and is ultimately rejected by the novels' characters and readers. Hence, these five novels progressively use not only male and female interactions but characters' and readers' perceptions to eliminate the idea of feminine weakness in Austen's fictional world. / Graduation date: 1999

This thesis aims essentially at a re-evaluation of the marginalisation that conventional critical assessment makes of Jane Austen's epistolary novella 'Lady Susan' (1794-1795). The consensus within Austen studies, one that has largely been unchanged and unchallenged since the time of the first professional academic accounts of Austen's work (and in turn influenced by the C19 view of the writer) is that 'Lady Susan' is an artistic failure, a regressive step in Austen's stylistic development and, most fundamentally, that its epistolarity is a constraint on the technical progress that Austen appeared to be making in work prior to this, most notably, the unfinished third-person novella "Catharine, or The Bower". The thesis provides a close reading of 'Lady Susan' and of 'Catharine' and in marked opposition to the consensus, concludes that 'Lady Susan' is an emphatic step forward in Austen's stylistic progress, most particularly through the manner in which it establishes a moral framework from within which to develop character and plot, its attainment of incipient narrative voice through a complex use and exploitation of epistolary polyphony (thereby foreshadowing the omniscient third-person narrators of Austen's mature fiction, in addition to its experimentation with a form of free indirect speech) and the markedly plausible realism that is present throughout the novella. Austen's termination of the epistolary section (the novella being concluded in third-person narrative - an ending that was added some time later and which is generally viewed as her own recognition of epistolary limitation), in the view of this thesis, therefore cannot be attributed to stylistic inadequacy or constraint, and obliges other motives to be posited. The thesis then proceeds to move from text into context and assesses the extra-literary factors that may have prompted Austen's abandonment of the epistolary section, according a co-centrality to the character of Catherine that has never before been emphasised in Austen studies and the consequences of which suggest the writer’s political engagement with “the French Question”, and with political concerns in general, at an age that is far earlier than most critics usually accept (‘Lady Susan’ was written when Austen was 19). Beyond the text itself, our close assessment of a broad range of critical views (both on ‘Catharine’ and ‘Lady Susan’) lead us to posit that the critical insistence on the novella’s inferiority and regressiveness, both of which claims we strongly refute through our close reading of the text, in fact corresponds to a determinedly evolutionary manner of understanding novelistic development, on that in turn derives from Ian Watt’s account of the rise of this literary form. In accordance with standard academic procedure, the thesis begins with a critical review—in this case, of epistolary studies— including studies that monographically consider Austen’s work. It also considers the role of Austen’s private correspondence in the broader question of literary epistolarity. The thesis terminates by adding to its conclusion the obligatory outlines of what we deem to be valid and necessary further research into this subject and related issues.

Zugl.: Jena, Univ., Diss., 2009