Jane Austen and Reflective Selfhood: Rereading the Self [Paperback]

This book makes connections between selfhood, reading practice and moral judgment which propose fresh insights into Austens narrative style and offer new ways of reading her work. It grounds her writing in the Enlightenment philosophy of selfhood, exploring how Austen takes five major components of selfhood theorymemory, imagination, probability, sympathy and reflectionand investigates their relation to self-formation and moral judgement. At the same time, Austens narrative style breaks new ground in the representation of consciousness and engages directly with contemporary concerns about reading practice. Drawing analogies between reading text and reading character, the book argues that Austens rendering of reading and rereading as both reflective and constitutive acts demonstrates their capacity to enable self-recognition and self-formation. It shows how Austen raises questions about the potential for different readings and, in so doing, challenges her readers to reflect on and reread their own interactions with her texts.

Introduction: Selfhood and the Novel.- Chapter One: Memory: Continuity, Coherence and Self-construction.- Chapter Two: Imagination and the Creative Self: The Reader and the Writer.- Chapter Three: Proofs, Probabilities and Ambiguities.- Chapter Four: Sympathy: The Self and Society.- Chapter Five: The Reflecting Self: Self-examination and Moral Judgement.- Chapter Six: Reflection, Reading Practice and Self-formation.- Conclusion.

Dr. Linda Charlton returned to research after a career spanning the UKs education, health and civil services. This is her first book. She is currently working on her second.

Jane Austen and Reflective Selfhood is a multi-layered and nuanced analysis that locates Austen within the Enlightenment philosophical tradition shaped by the work of Locke, Hume, and Slã…