Jane Austen and Modernization

Sociological Readings

By: James Thompson

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Hardcover | 19 February 2015

At a Glance

Hardcover
224 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
21.59 x 13.97 x 1.42

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Jane Austen and Modernization presents something of a conundrum. How can Austen be yoked to a vast series of historical changes that postdate her writing life by at least half a century? The canonization of Austen and the development of a popular readership was 50 years in the making though and during these years, readers and critics of all stripes responded to Austen's work as representative of a social and historical formation that they themselves felt they were losing. This same half century corresponds to the development and institutionalization of sociology, the social science promulgated to answer the questions of modernity, to provide the tools and vocabulary to understand the period's erosion of social and moral cohesion. James Thompson argues here that the early sociologists - Durkheim, Weber, Simmel and Goffman - share a concern about social cohesion with Austen. Through sociological analysis of six novels, this book highlights the dynamic and dramatic process of individuation and offers an original, interdisciplinary intervention.

Industry Reviews

"Jane Austen and Modernization might be most accessible to more advanced students of Austen, since a familiarity with the novels and with the canon of Austen criticism is presumed. It would also be well suited to, as well as edifying for, scholars interested in cross-disciplinary studies, since it demonstrates both the potential pitfalls as well as the benefits of such analytical fusion." (Megan Taylor, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 29 (1), 2016)

"In this radically new way of thinking about Austen, James Thompson describes the ground shared by Austen and the foundational sociological thinkers - notably Simmel, Weber, and Goffman - producing invigorating reflections on the resonance between Austen's representations of how people meet, converse, manifest themselves, and think about the other, Simmel's theory of sociation, and how Goffman understands 'social frames' in his The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. The conclusion is a bravura display of how and why Austen's work still speaks to the various modernizations being experienced in the world today." - Robert Clark, The Literary Encyclopedia

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