Jane Austen and Modernization

Jane Austen and Modernization might be most accessible to more advanced students of Austen, since a familiarity with the novels and with the canon of Austen criticism is presumed. It would also be well suited to, as well as edifying for, scholars interested in cross-disciplinary studies, since it demonstrates both the potential pitfalls as well as the benefits of such analytical fusion. (Megan Taylor, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 29 (1), 2016)

" In this radically new way of thinking about Austen, James Thompson describes the ground shared by Austen and the foundational sociological thinkers - notably Simmel, Weber, and Goffman - producing invigorating reflections on the resonance between Austen' s representations of how people meet, converse, manifest themselves, and think about the other, Simmel' s theory of sociation, and how Goffman understands ' social frames' in his The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. The conclusion is a bravura display of how and why Austen' s work still speaks to the various modernizations being experienced in the world today. " - Robert Clark, The Literary Encyclopedia