SCHC 452 H02 26475

Humanities, EngLit, AIU

Notes:

Jane Austen Lives! There’s no good movie about Wordsworth. Ditto for Blake. And also for Byron – which is surprising given his reputation for being so mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Jane Campion’s movie about John Keats and Fanny Brawne is pretty good, but that’s just one. And even Mary Shelley has been failed by most of the attempts to bring her powerful creation story to the screen. But Jane Austen, a writer from the same period, continues to live on, more popular in the twenty-first century than she was in her own day. She lives on TV. She lives on film. She lives in fan clubs and on Youtube and in books where zombies eat her characters. And, of course, she lives on in her novels, which continue to be reissued with cool covers and introductions by famous people. Why? What is it about Austen – about her plots, her characters, her style – that continues to fascinate and entertain? In this course, we will try to answer this question by reading the novels and letters, by looking at a variety of adaptations, and by studying critical accounts of Austen herself, the canon, and the making of literary celebrity.