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About this book
Jane Austen is often thought of as a secular author, because religion seems absent from her novels, because she satirises her clerical characters, and because history and literacy criticism - and the literary sensibility of the twenty-first century reader - is overwhelmingly secular. Michael Giffin offers a reading of Austen's published novels against the background of a 'long eighteenth century' that stretched from the Restoration to the end of the Georgian period. He demonstrates that Austen is a neoclassical author of the Enlightenment who writes through the twin prisms of British Empiricism and Georgian Anglicanism. His focus is on how Austen's novels mirror a belief in natural law and natural order; and how they reflect John Locke's theory of knowledge through reason, revelation and reflection on experience. His reading suggests there is a thread of neoclassical philosophy and theology running through and between each of Austen's novels, which is best understood in its cultural context.
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Table of contents (7 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Reviews
'...original and enlightening...' - Laura Mooneyham White, JASNA News
About the author
MICHAEL GIFFIN is postgraduate course author and supervisor in Literature and Theology at the Sydney College of Divinity. As an author he has published three books of literary criticism as well as several journal articles in Literature and Theology. As an Anglican priest Michael has ministered in parishes, psychiatric hospitals, aged care facilities, hospices, universities and schools and is currently licensed to officiate as a priest within the Diocese of Sydney.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Jane Austen and Religion
Book Subtitle: Salvation and Society in Georgian England
Authors: Michael Giffin
Series Title: Cross Currents in Religion and Culture
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403913630
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan London
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts Collection, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2002
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-333-94808-8Published: 21 June 2002
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4039-1363-0Published: 21 June 2002
Series ISSN: 2947-8448
Series E-ISSN: 2947-8456
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: VII, 222
Topics: Twentieth-Century Literature, Fiction, Early Modern/Renaissance Literature, British and Irish Literature, Nineteenth-Century Literature