The first of its kind, this collection brings together writers from diverse academic and nonacademic worlds to explore how Austen's readers experience and process her novels' erotic power. Are Jane Austen's novels sexy? For many Austen lovers, the answer is a resounding "Yes!" From the moment Colin Firth stripped down to his breeches and shirt in the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice, screen adaptations inspired by Austen's novels have banked on their ability to depict sexual tension and romantic desire. Meanwhile, the success of spin-offs, sequels, and elaborations confirms that Austen's novels have become a potent aphrodisiac for everyday readers. Clearly, the fourteen million viewers who watched Firth's unveiling were onto something: Austen's novels turn people on. Jane Austen, Sex, and Romance: Engaging with Desire in the Novels and Beyond brings together a range of voices-from literary scholars to video game designers-to explore how different types of readers experience the realm of desire and the erotic in all things Austen. In this timely collection, writers, critics, journalists, and authors of internet content weigh in on sex and romance in Austen's works and in the conversations and creations the novels inspire-from sequels to critical analyses to online role-playing games. Contributors examine what is at stake for each set of Austen enthusiasts when Eros is added to the equation, in so doing building on the long tradition of Austen criticism and enriching our appreciation of the novels.

In bringing biography and celebrity together, the essays in Making Stars interrogate contemporary and current understandings of each. Although biography was not invented in the eighteenth century, the period saw the emergence of works that focus on individuals who are interesting as much, if not more, for their everyday, lived experience than for their status or actions. At the same time, celebrity emerged as public fascination for the private lives of publicly visible individuals. Biography and celebrity are mutually constitutive, but in complex and varied ways that this volume unpacks. Contributors to this volume present us a picture of eighteenth-century celebrity that was mediated across multiple sites, demonstrating that eighteenth-century celebrity culture in Britain was more pervasive, diverse and, in many ways, more egalitarian, than previously supposed.

This book explores a cultural language, the heroic, that remained consistently powerful through the social, political, and dynastic turbulence of the long eighteenth century. The heroic provided an accessible and vivid shorthand for the ongoing ideological debates over the nature of authority and power, the construction of an ideal masculinity, and the shape of a new, British_rather than English_national identity. An analysis of this cultural language and its different valence over time not only unpacks the overlap between aesthetic and political debate in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, but also firmly grounds the eighteenth-century's revolution in taste and manners in the ongoing ideological debates about dynastic politics and the foundations of authority. Specifically, the book traces the making and breaking of the Stuart mythology through the development of and attacks on the heroic mode from the Restoration through the aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite uprising.