Holiday Weekend Bookblogging: It's Still The Weekend So It Still Counts Edition

May 26, 2008

by Mags

We’ve been busy celebrating Memorial Day this weekend at AustenBlog World Headquarters. Dorothy grilled up some burgers and made her “special” iced tea, and next thing we knew we woke up and it was Monday night. Very special indeed. We’ve got a great lineup of articles about books featuring Jane Austen’s characters and articles about Jane Austen’s books, so let’s get started.

Jonathan Gotschall opines that a better way to study literature would be to get away from all that subjective stuff and approach the subject from a scientific standpoint.

Or consider this shibboleth of modern literary theory: the author is dead. Roughly speaking, this statement means that authors have no power over their readers. When we read stories we do not so much yield to the author’s creation as create it anew ourselves – manufacturing our own highly idiosyncratic meanings as we go along. This idea has radical implications: If it is true, there can be no shared understanding of what literary works mean. But like so much else that passes for knowledge in contemporary literary studies, this assertion has its basis only in the swaggering authority of its asserter – in this case, Roland Barthes, one of the founding giants of poststructuralist literary theory.

Is this one of those squishy, unfalsifiable literary claims? No, it is also testable. Hijacking methods from psychology, Joseph Carroll, John Johnson, Dan Kruger, and I surveyed the emotional and analytic responses of 500 literary scholars and avid readers to characters from scores of 19th-century British novels. We wanted to determine how different their reading experiences truly were. Did reactions to characters vary profoundly from reader to reader? As we write in “Graphing Jane Austen,” a book undergoing peer review, there were variations in what our readers thought and felt about literary characters, but it was expertly contained by the authors within narrow ranges. Our conclusion: rumors of the author’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.

Being a reader interested in the historical context of novels, we never subscribed to the dead-author thing anyway, but we can see that this approach has its good points and its bad points. Good points: interesting discussion about, for instance, the contrast of Jane Austen’s opinions of Bath while writing Northanger Abbey and while writing Persuasion some years later. Bad points: Becoming Jane and all the new genre of poor-Jane-Austen-never-found-her-Mr.-Darcy-so-let’s-give-her-one books and films. We expect our Gentle Readers to have more to say on this subject.

We found references to several new books mentioning Jane Austen and her characters.

Novel Destinations: Literary Landmarks from Jane Austen’s Bath to Ernest Hemingway’s Key West by Shannon McKenna Schmidt and Joni Rendon can help you plan an upcoming holiday.

The Baum Plan for Financial Independence by John Kessel is not, despite its title, a nonfiction tome but a collection of short stories that includes something of interest to Janeites:

The last story, “Pride and Prometheus,” is a miscegenation of Mary Shelley and Jane Austen wherein Victor Frankenstein tries to woo Mary Bennet. It’s the kind of writing that only a serious reader could do, and the latter story avoids the fan-fiction trap by convincingly emulating Austen’s prose.

We’ve heard that before! It’s all fan fiction, and we mean that as a compliment.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal chooses Pride and Prejudice as a book that everyone has to read at least once in their lives.

“I guess it’s a book that really speaks to human relationships and how people interact with each other,” said Padmini Jambulapati, a seventh-grade reading teacher at Smith Middle School.

“It’s just a classic. And people reference it all the time.”

The novel also offers insight into how people think, said Wendy Starkweather, director of user services for University Libraries at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

While Austen is “probably getting overdone at this point,” she said, the novel examines the “whole male-female relationship in the 19th century. And it’s an examination by a very thoughtful woman author that is a valuable sort of lesson in life.”

Hey–it’s not OUR fault that Jane Austen is getting overdone. Tell that to these two young ladies, junior high students who read a combined 28,000 pages in 11 weeks; one of them read all of Jane Austen’s novels. Bless!

PopMatters asks the eternal question: can one have too many copies of beloved novels?

I’ve always been a Jane Austen fan, and Pride & Prejudice holds a special place in my heart. A few years ago for my birthday I was surprised to receive a beautiful red hard-bound copy with gilded edges and gold embossed print on the spine. Printed in my birth year, no less. It was gorgeous, and brand spanking new, by the look of it. The same day, I was doubly surprised to receive a lovely used copy of the same book, bound in green with marbled endpapers and a perfectly fitted box that held the book tidily inside. Suddenly I seemed to have a small but growing collection of Pride & Prejudice, and I didn’t mind at all!

I’ve never sat down and read either of those beautiful copies, preferring to use a beat up paperback version if I want to reread it. Having them on my shelf, however, is comforting in some odd way, like keeping love tokens around even after a relationship has ended.

And finally, Tasha Alexander, author of several suspense novels set in the Victorian era, writes about her love of Mr. Darcy at History Hoydens.

He’s far from perfect. He’s (not to put too fine a point on it) a complete jerk when he’s trying (in vain; fool) not to love Elizabeth. And when he finally acknowledges the scheme is a futile endeavor, his proposal falls short of inspiring. Who among us longs to be told she is loved against someone’s better judgment? Darcy’s concerns, though insulting, are real. A man in his position would get grief for marrying “beneath” him. Silly though that may seem to us today, we can nonetheless understand the difficulties posed by choosing a marriage to which your family objects.

But, as Ms. Alexander points out, he makes up for it.