Download or read book Jane Austen and Altruism written by Magdalen Ki and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-02-26 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jane Austen and Altruism identifies a compelling theme, namely, the view that Jane Austen propounds a rigorous, boundary-sensitive model of altruism that counters the human propensity to selfishness and promotes the culture of cooperation. In her days, altruism was commonly known as "benevolence", "charity," or "philanthropy", and these concepts overlap with Auguste Comte’s later definition of altruism as "otherism". This volume argues that Austen’s thinking co-opts the evolutionary idea that altruism is seldom truly pure, egoism cannot be eradicated, and boundless group altruism is not sustainable. However, given that she comes from a naval and clergy family, she witnesses the power of wartime patriotism, the Evangelical revival, the Regency culture of politeness, and the sentimental novels. In her novels, she locates human relationships along an altruism continuum that ranges from enlightened selfishness to pathological altruism. Unconditional love is hard to find, but empathy, kin altruism, reciprocal exchange, and group altruism are key to the formation of self-identity, family, community and the nation state.
Download or read book The Selfish Gene written by Richard Dawkins and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1989 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science need not be dull and bogged down by jargon, as Richard Dawkins proves in this entertaining look at evolution. The themes he takes up are the concepts of altruistic and selfish behaviour; the genetical definition of selfish interest; the evolution of aggressive behaviour; kinshiptheory; sex ratio theory; reciprocal altruism; deceit; and the natural selection of sex differences. 'Should be read, can be read by almost anyone. It describes with great skill a new face of the theory of evolution.' W.D. Hamilton, Science
Download or read book Jane Austen and Leisure written by David Selwyn and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 1998-07-01 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jane Austen's novels portray a leisured society of gentlemen and ladies who do not need to work. Even the minority of clergymen, soldiers and sailors - men with professions - are almost never seen working. Jane Austen herself, despite responsibility for some domestic tasks, wrote as a woman of leisure. Yet leisure, the distinguishing mark of a gentleman, was not meant to be an excuse for idleness. The proper use of leisure to fulfil duties, to read and to think, and above all to pursue social relations in a world where family and marriage for the propertied was of central importance, was a vital test of character.
Download or read book Comeuppance written by William Flesch and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With Comeuppance, William Flesch delivers the freshest, most generous thinking about the novel since Walter Benjamin wrote on the storyteller and Wayne C. Booth on the rhetoric of fiction. In clear and engaging prose, Flesch integrates evolutionary psychology into literary studies, creating a new theory of fiction in which form and content flawlessly intermesh. Fiction, Flesch contends, gives us our most powerful way of making sense of the social world. Comeuppance begins with an exploration of the appeal of gossip and ends with an account of how we can think about characters and care about them as much as about persons we know to be real. We praise a storyteller who contrives a happy or at least an appropriate ending, and fault the writer who refuses us one. Flesch uses Darwinian theory to show how fiction satisfies our desire to see the good vindicated and the wicked get their comeuppance. He conveys the danger and excitement of reading fiction with nimble intelligence and provides wide reference to stories both familiar and little known. Flesch has given us a book that is sure to claim a central place in the discussion of literature and the humanities.
Download or read book The Making of Jane Austen written by Devoney Looser and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2017-06-27 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Returning author Devoney Looser has written a study of Jane Austen's legacy in high and popular culture, looking at stage and film adaptations of her work, how Austen has been taught in classrooms, Austen's depiction in visual culture, and Austen's role in the women's suffragist movement. Looser draws on popular print and unpublished archival sources, amassing evidence from high, middlebrow, and popular culture, in order to craft a more capacious history of posthumous reception. The book is a detailed and revealing account of what Looser calls the "public dimension" of Jane Austen, who is a "manufactured creation." Looser has dug deep and come up with brand-new material on Austen, something that is very hard to do. This is the kind of material that Janeites and Austen scholars live for"--
Download or read book Jane Austen s Possessions and Dispossessions written by Sandie Byrne and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who owns, who buys, who gives, and who notices objects is always significant in Austen's writing, placing characters socially and characterizing them symbolically. Jane Austen's Possessions and Dispossessions looks at the significance of objects in Austen's major novels, fragments, and juvenilia.
Download or read book Jane Austen and her Readers 17861945 written by Katie Halsey and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘Jane Austen and her Readers, 1786–1945’ is a study of the history of reading Jane Austen’s novels. It discusses Austen’s own ideas about books and readers, the uses she makes of her reading, and the aspects of her style that are related to the ways in which she has been read. The volume considers the role of editions and criticism in directing readers’ responses, and presents and analyses a variety of source material related to the ordinary readers who read Austen’s works between 1786 and 1945.
Download or read book Jane Austen s Emma written by Paula Byrne and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This sourcebook introduces not only Jane Austen's text, but also the literary and historical contexts and the many different critical readings that it has generated, from the time of its publication to the twenty-first century.
Download or read book Tolstoy s Family Prototypes in War and Peace written by Brett Cooke and published by Academic Studies PRess. This book was released on 2020-11-24 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What were the consequences of Tolstoy’s unusual reliance on members of his family as source material for War and Peace? Did affection for close relatives influence depictions of these real prototypes in his fictional characters? Tolstoy used these models to consider his origins, to ponder alternative family histories, and to critique himself. Comparison of the novel and its fascinating drafts with the writer’s family history reveals increasing preferential treatment of those with greater relatedness to him: kin altruism, i.e., nepotism. This pattern helps explain many of Tolstoy’s choices amongst plot variants he considered, as well as some of the curious devices he utilizes to get readers to share his biases, such as coincidences, notions of “fate,” and aversion to incest.
Download or read book The Genius of Jane Austen written by Paula Byrne and published by William Collins. This book was released on 2017 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A radical look at Jane Austen as you've never seen her - as a lover of farce, comic theatre and juvenilia. Jane's World celebrates Britain's favourite novelist 200 years after her death and explores why her books make such awesome movies, time after time. Jane Austen loved the theatre. She learned much of her art from a long tradition of English comic drama and took joyous participation in amateur theatricals. Her juvenilia, then Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice,Mansfield Park and Emma were shaped by the arts of theatrical comedy. Her admiration for drama's dialogue, characterisation, plotting, exits and entrances is why she has been dramatised so successfully on screen in the last twenty years - and these versions are at the centre of her continuing fame, culminating in her celebration on �10 note. Austen expert and author of The Real Jane Austen, Paula Byrne looks at stage adaptations of Austen's novels (including one called Miss Elizabeth Bennet by A. A. Milne) to modern classics, including the BBC Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, Emma Thompson's Sense and Sensibility, and the phenomenally brilliant and successful Clueless, Jane's World presents an Austen not of prim manners and genteel calm, but filled with wild comedy and outrageous behaviour.
Download or read book Jane Austen written by Oscar W. Firkins and published by Jazzybee Verlag. This book was released on 1920 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography worth reading. The author has looked at Miss Austen more through his own eyes, and less through the eyes of her many illustrious eulogists, than any other writer we know of. Even when he is in harmony with the opinions of Miss Austen's posterity one feels his first-handedness. Not one of his more heretical opinions exists for the sake of saying something new. This critical study of Jane Austen falls into three parts: the novelist; the realist; the woman. Part 1 is a searching and unsparing analysis of the six novels, with particular reterence to plot. Part 2 is a more brief and general treatment of the characters. Part 3, the biographical section, is a study of Miss Austen's personality as revealed in her letters and reflected in the novels.
Download or read book Jane Austen s Emma written by J. F. Burrows and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-11-30 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1968, Jane Austen’s Emma is a critical study of Miss Austen’s last completed novel. While often pausing to analyse and comment on major contemporary critics, Dr. Burrows provides a detailed insight into this outstanding novel. He has clarified certain of the book’s qualities, placing detail back into its proper context and perspective. Comic relief is contrasted with the serious and the sensitivity and capacity for change of her chief personages and the subtle use of such of Austen’s words as ‘sensible’ and ‘amiable’ are deftly treated. A select bibliography is included. This book will be of interest to students of literature, women’s studies, gender studies as well as to casual readers of Jane Austen’s novels.
Download or read book Jane Austen Mansfield Park written by Sandie Byrne and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2004-10-28 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first novel of the author's maturity, Mansfield Park is complex, highly wrought, and experimental. It marks a transitional stage between the first two published novels, Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, and Jane Austen's greatest achievements, Emma and Persuasion. It has been suggested that Mansfield Park is the writer's most autobiographical novel and that, in seeing through the eyes of Fanny Price, deemed the most moralising and judgemental of her heroines, we are seeing through the eyes of Austen herself. Though Fanny Price may be too virtuous for modern readers to take to their hearts, in Mrs Norris Austen creates one of her best, because most plausible, monsters; while in the estate of Mansfield Park itself we find some of the most fully realised descriptions of domestic interiors and exteriors in Austen's fiction. This Guide traces the response to Mansfield Park from the opinions of Jane Austen's contemporaries, through 19th century reviews and 20th century critical analyses, including deconstructionist, feminist, postcolonial and poststructuralist, to diverse 21st century approaches to the novel. Sandie Byrne selects the most useful and insightful of these responses and puts them in context, providing the reader with an essential and approachable introduction to the range of critical debate on this important novel.
Download or read book Jane Austen s Women written by Kathleen Anderson and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2018-11-30 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why does Jane Austen "mania" continue unabated in a postmodern world? How does the brilliant Regency novelist speak so personally to today's women that they view her as their best friend? Jane Austen's Women answers these questions by exploring Austen's affirming yet challenging vision of both who her dynamic female characters are, and who they become. This important new work analyzes the heroines' relationships to body, mind, spirit, environment, and society. It reveals how, despite a restrictive patriarchal culture, these women achieve greatness. In clear, lively prose, Kathleen Anderson shares original theoretical insights from twenty years of studying Austen, and illuminates the novels as guidebooks on how to become an Austenian heroine in one's everyday life. This engaging book will appeal to a broad readership: the serious student, the general lit-lover, and the Austen neophyte alike.
Download or read book Jane Austen and the Buddha written by Kathryn Duncan and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2021-11-01 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jane Austen wrote six books that were published at the beginning of the 19th century, all with happy endings. Yet below the courtship novels' sparkling wit and dance scenes flows an undercurrent of suffering. Austen had a deep understanding of the sources and cure for suffering that shares much in common with Buddhism. Though not intentionally writing through the lens of Buddhism, Austen intuitively understood the Buddha's most fundamental teaching of the Four Noble Truths: that life contains suffering, that we can discover the causes of suffering, and that we can stop suffering by following the Eightfold Path described by the Buddha. In this book, Austen fans or those who wish for a deeper understanding of how stories can alleviate suffering will discover a combination of psychology and Buddhism alongside accessible close readings of Austen. This unique approach offers insight into Austen's enduring popularity and lessons we might apply to our own lives to find happiness--just like Austen's heroines.
Download or read book Metaphysics Soul and Ethics in Ancient Thought written by Ricardo Salles and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-02-03 with total page 559 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading figures in ancient philosophy present new essays on themes from the work of Richard Sorabji, paying tribute to his great achievements and leading his ideas in fresh directions. Sorabji himself contributes to the volume with a fascinating 'intellectual autobiography'. Contributors Sylvia Berryman, Marcelo D. Boeri, Robert Bolton, Sarah Broadie, Myles Burnyeat, Gabriela Roxana Carone, V. Caston, Christopher Gill, Frans A. J. de Haas, Brad Inwood, Charles H. Kahn, A. A. Long, Mary Margaret McCabe, Alexander P. D. Mourelatos, A. W. Price, Ricardo Salles, David Sedley, Bob Sharples, Richard Sorabji.
Download or read book Jane Austen Irony as Defense and Discovery written by Marvin Mudrick and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1968 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
