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.

Samuel Johnson’s life was situated within a rich social and intellectual community of friendships—and antagonisms. Community and Solitude is a collection of ten essays that explore relationships between Johnson and several of his main contemporaries—including James Boswell, Edmund Burke, Frances Burney, Robert Chambers, Oliver Goldsmith, Bennet Langton, Arthur Murphy, Richard Savage, Anna Seward, and Thomas Warton—and analyzes some of the literary productions emanating from the pressures within those relationships. In their detailed and careful examination of particular works situated within complex social and personal contexts, the essays in this volume offer a “thick� and illuminating description of Johnson’s world that also engages with larger cultural and aesthetic issues, such as intertextuality, literary celebrity, narrative, the nature of criticism, race, slavery, and sensibility. Contributors: Christopher Catanese, James Caudle, Marilyn Francus, Christine Jackson-Holzberg, Claudia Thomas Kairoff, Elizabeth Lambert, Anthony W. Lee, James E. May, John Radner, and Lance Wilcox. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Jane Austen distinguished herself with genius in literature, but she was immersed in all of the arts. Austen loved dancing, played the piano proficiently, meticulously transcribed piano scores, attended concerts and art exhibits, read broadly, wrote poems, sat for portraits by her sister Cassandra, and performed in theatricals. For her, art functioned as a social bond, solidifying her engagement with community and offering order. And yet Austen’s hold on readers’ imaginations owes a debt to the omnipresent threat of disorder that often stems—ironically—from her characters’ socially disruptive artistic sensibilities and skill. Drawing from a wealth of recent historicist and materialist Austen scholarship, this timely work explores Austen’s ironic use of art and artifact to probe selfhood, alienation, isolation, and community in ways that defy simple labels and acknowledge the complexity of Austen’s thought. Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.  

Stage Mothers explores the connections between motherhood and the theater both on and off stage throughout the long eighteenth century. Although the realities of eighteenth-century motherhood and representations of maternity have recently been investigated in relation to the novel, social history, and political economy, the idea of motherhood and its connection to the theatre as a professional, material, literary, and cultural site has received little critical attention. The essays in this volume, spanning the period from the Restoration to Regency, address these forgotten maternal narratives, focusing on: the representation of motherhood as the defining female role; the interplay between an actress's celebrity persona and her chosen roles; the performative balance between the cults of maternity and that of the "passionate" actress; and tensions between sex and maternity and/or maternity and public authority. In examining the overlaps and disconnections between representations and realities of maternity in the long eighteenth century, and by looking at written, received, visual, and performed records of motherhood, Stage Mothers makes an important contribution to debates central to eighteenth-century cultural history.

Writing Lives in the Eighteenth Century is a collection of essays on memoir, biography, and autobiography during a formative period for the genre. The essays revolve around recognized male and female figures - returning to the Boswell and Burney circle - but present arguments that dismantle traditional privileging of biographical modes. The contributors reconsider the processes of hero making in the beginning phases of a culture of celebrity. Employing the methodology William Godwin outlined for novelists of taking material from all sources, experience, report, and the records of human affairs, each contributor examines within the contexts of their time and historical traditions the anxieties and imperatives of the auto/biographer as she or he shapes material into a legacy. New work on Frances Burney D'Arblay's son, Alexander, as revealed through letters; on Isabelle de Charriere; on Hester Thrale Piozzi; and on Alicia LeFanu and Frances Burney's realignment of family biography extend current conversations about eighteenth century biography and autobiography.