Lecture Date: February 24, 2015
Is it possible to talk about the great life of an author who has always been famous for not having a life at all? for “shrink[ing] from notoriety,” and for leading a “life of usefulness, literature, and religion,” rather than a “life of event?” For her many detractors Jane Austen is a writer whose own life had no great story and whose novels depict boring households and villages in which likewise nothing of real importance ever happens. To her admirers, by contrast, Austen – or, rather, “Jane” – is dear, matchless, and miraculous, despite the un-great, non-descript, un-momentous matter of her fiction and her life. Professor Johnson’s talk will ponder how this apparent contradiction between greatness and ordinariness is resolved in the case of the great life of the divine Jane Austen.
Lecture Photos
Speaker: Claudia Johnson
Claudia L. Johnson joined the faculty at Princeton in 1994 and was Chair of the English Department from 2004-2012. She specializes in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature, with a particular emphasis on the novel. In addition to eighteenth-century survey courses, she teaches courses on gothic fiction, sentimentality and melodrama, the history of prose style, film adaptations of novels into film, on Samuel Johnson, and, of course, Jane Austen. In addition, she has strong interests in eighteenth-century music and culture, in the idea of voice, in mysteries and narrative theory, in Yiddish story and Yiddish periodicals, and in the American Songbook of the 1930’s and 1940s. Johnson’s most recent book is Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures (Chicago, 2012), which won the 2013 Christian Gauss Award. Her other books books include Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel(Chicago, 1988), Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender and Sentimentality in the 1790s (Chicago, 1995), and The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft (Cambridge, 2002), The Blackwell Companion to Jane Austen, ed. with Clara Tuite (Blackwell, 2005). She has also prepared critical editions of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (Norton, 1998), Sense and Sensibility (Norton, 2002), Northanger Abbey (Oxford, 2003), and (with Susan Wolfson) Pride and Prejudice (Longman, 2003). Her research has been supported by major fellowships such as the NEH and the Guggenheim.