The readings from F.R.Leavis, Stephen Greenblatt,and Franco Moretti are fairly straightforward, and offer three distinct approaches to literary history.
Discussion Topic: After reading through the extracts, share your reflections in a "Reply All" email over how each approach might offer a different topic for an essay on Jane Austen as a novelist.
- What aspects of a Jane Austen novel/novels would you focus upon if you evaluated…
-- Jane Austen using Leavis's criteria of great writers as exquisite formalists and serious moralists, qualifications he requires for members of what he terms the "Great Tradition ." Leavis approaches literary history by focusing upon peaks of literary achievement in different eras. Topic example: Emma as designing heroine. - What aspects of a Jane Austen novel/novels would you focus upon if you evaluated…
--Jane Austen, using Greenblatt's criteria of reading literary works in relation to non-literary texts of the age. If her novels were read in relation to Conduct books for young women of the Regency era, what kind of topic for an essay would you formulate? Topic example: Badly Behaved women in Pride and Prejudice.
- What aspects of a Jane Austen novel/novels would you focus upon if you evaluated…
-- Jane Austen,using Moretti's criteria of quantitative data, that assesses the popularity or decline of subgenres such as the novel of Courtship and Marriage over time. What kind of topic for an essay would you produce if you addressed her popularity in the early 19th and 21st centuries, especially in film in the case of the latter, and her lack of popularity during much of the twentieth century.Topic example: The Sentimental Reader, and Jane Austen.
How might different understandings of literary history affect our understanding of an author ?
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