Jane Austen’s Invisible Men: Beyond the Drawing Room

The Expanding Sense and Sensibility Text Universe

This article asks why people are obsessed with Jane Austen’s stories and why her stories are spreading across the globe, across media forms, and across generations? In an attempt to analyse the Austenmania-phenomenon, this article examines various representations of Austen’s Sense and Sensibility in order to discuss what these representations contribute with to the understanding of the source t...

The Evolution of Literary Theory: towards a Bio-cultural Approach to Literature through Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey

Gina Macdonald and Andrew Macdonald

Timothy Corrigan has argued that the relationship between the two media of film and literature has “a history of ambivalence, confrontation, and mutual dependence,”1 succinctly summing up the range of critical reaction to film productions of Jane Austen novels. The “mutual dependence” is evident: Austen films have brought her novels a far wider readership than she herself could have imagined. U...

Extracting Family Relationship Networks from Novels

We present an approach to the extraction of family relations from literary narrative, which incorporates a technique for utterance attribution proposed recently by Elson and McKeown (2010). In our work this technique is used in combination with the detection of vocatives — the explicit forms of address used by the characters in a novel. We take advantage of the fact that certain vocatives indic...

The Novel as Dutch Painting

In a memorable review of Jane Austen’s Emma (1816), Walter Scott cele­ brated the novelist for her faithful representation of the familiar and the commonplace. Austen had, according to Scott, helped to perfect what was fundamentally a new kind of fiction: “the art of copying from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life.” Rather than “the splendid scenes of an imaginary world,” h...