The essays collected in Jane Austen and the Arts; Elegance, Propriety, and Harmony examine Austen's understanding of the arts, her aesthetic philosophy, and her role as artist. Together, they explore Austen's connections with Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Madame de Stael, Joanna Baillie, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck, and other writers engaged in debates on the sensuous experience and the intellectual judgment of art. Our contributors look at Austen's engagement with diverse art forms, painting, ballet, drama, poetry, and music, investigating our topic within historically grounded and theoretically nuanced essays. They represent Austen as a writer-thinker reflecting on the nature and practice of artistic creation and considering the social, moral, psychological, and theological functions of art in her fiction. We suggest that Austen knew, modified, and transformed the dominant aesthetic discourses of her era, at times ironically, to her own artistic ends. As a result, a new, and compelling image of Austen emerges, a "portrait of a lady artist" confidently promoting her own distinctly post-enlightenment aesthetic system.

Truthful Pictures examines novels and sermons written in the antebellum South, in particular those written after the 1851 publication of "Uncle Tom's Cabin." It begins with a historical overview of the function of women writers in American literature in order to help locate sentimental fiction within the historical place of women in America by analyzing the works of Southern female authors such as Caroline Hentz and Mary H. Eastman. Though they follow in Harriet Beecher Stowe's footsteps, authors like Hentz and Eastman used their voice in conjunction with Christian ideology to support slavery. The text then explores the way in which Holy Scripture was perverted in Southern sermons by pulpit leaders such as Thorton Stringfellow and Alexander McCaine in order to allow the continued enslavement of one group by another, using religion to defend white patriarchy as the normal way of life. By examining antebellum sermons and writings and their influence on sentimental novels, Truthful Picture shows how religious texts reinforced political ideologies in the wake of increasing racial tensions between the North and the South.

The essays collected in Jane Austen and the Arts; Elegance, Propriety, and Harmony examine Austen's understanding of the arts, her aesthetic philosophy, and her role as artist. Together, they explore Austen's connections with Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Madame de Stael, Joanna Baillie, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck, and other writers engaged in debates on the sensuous experience and the intellectual judgment of art. Our contributors look at Austen's engagement with diverse art forms, painting, ballet, drama, poetry, and music, investigating our topic within historically grounded and theoretically nuanced essays. They represent Austen as a writer-thinker reflecting on the nature and practice of artistic creation and considering the social, moral, psychological, and theological functions of art in her fiction. We suggest that Austen knew, modified, and transformed the dominant aesthetic discourses of her era, at times ironically, to her own artistic ends. As a result, a new, and compelling image of Austen emerges, a "portrait of a lady artist" confidently promoting her own distinctly post-enlightenment aesthetic system.