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Janeites: Austen's Disciples and Devotees/The Postcolonial Jane Austen/Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon
Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 2002 by Gilroy, Amanda
New Millennial Austens DEIRDRE LYNCH, ed., Janeites: Austen's Disciples and Devotees (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 233 + ix, cloth, $32.00, paper, $19.95.
YOU-ME PARK AND RAJEWARI SUNDER RAJAN, eds., The Postcolonial Jane Austen (London: Routledge Press, 2000), pp. 254 + xiv, cloth, $95.00.
CLARA TUITE, Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 242 + xiii, cloth, $55.00.
On the evidence of much recent work in literary/cultural studies, the academy would seem to have fully incorporated and internalized the mantra of "the historicity of texts and the textuality of histories": I suspect that many of us privilege those texts whose thick descriptions are historically illuminating in ways that we have come to recognize (texts which invite enquiry into the material circumstances of their production or into their formal and ideological complicities with cross-disciplinary co-texts). The risk of new(ish) modes of historicization is that we adopt a purist privileging of the originary moment of a text's production as the only site of its value. Jane Austen has been thoroughly historicized of late-far from seeing her as transcending her historical context, academic critics have read her novels for the traces of historical inscription. But Austen is a cross-over phenomenon with a popular as well as a high cultural life: internet chats about Austen characters, Jane Austen writing paper and playing cards, Regency costume balls, heritage films, and coffee table books with bucolic images of England flout or remake the specificities of history. Austen's admirers are often accused of nostalgia, a sort of inauthentic memory of the past, a wishful faith in simulacra. The three books under review here implicitly suggest that the specter of nostalgia should not be repressed but rather embraced as history; they understand nostalgia "strategically," as Nicholas Dames has recently formulated it.1 Forging what Deidre Lynch calls "an alliance of cultural studies and cultural history" (6), these books refuse to fetishize the archive and instead examine the cultural reproductions of Austen. They demonstrate the modes by which cultural objects are appropriated to define as well as to displace class, sexual, racial and ethnic identities. They also speculate on the role of affect in reading Austen and in cultural memory. Since Austen's afterlife has so often been paired with Literature's, the stakes in these readings may be higher than one might at first suspect.
Clara Tuite's Romantic Austen focuses on a number of specific canonical constructions of Austen in order to interrogate "the relationship between Austen's Romantic moment of production and her later post-Romantic moments of canonical reception and reproduction" (2). She names her approach "historicizing" but stresses that she does not read for the alterity of the past but for the problematic continuities between past and present: Austen's fictions are the palimpsestic site of a continuing and "specifically Romantic form of British national culture" (2). The capacious Introduction offers a useful guided tour of dominant canonical constructions, or "canonicity effects," of Austen. These include the "Augustan Austen," the star of Ian Watts's The Rise of the Novel and Leavis's Great Tradition, the arbiter of good taste, whose ironic "style" is fetishized, and misrecognized, as aristocratic, rather than as a bourgeois critique and reproduction of aristocratic culture, and the "green" Austen, who is conflated with the social and natural forms of the English countryside. Tuite offers a canny reading of practices of "cultural tourism," noting the irony that "the Austen revival rejuvenates a cultural artifact that was itself produced in order to revive a beleaguered landed aristocratic culture" (13). Heritage films, British Tourist Board adverts and fashion advertisements all demonstrate Austen's cross-over (high/popular) cultural appeal and market the fiction of democratic access to Austen's countryside, our vicarious ownership of the national heritage. Tuite's third canonical Austen is the mouthpiece of heteronormativity: Austen's courtship fictions traditionally have been seen to institutionalize marriage, inheritance and dynasty, and as such they function as "a primal romance of British national culture" (17). Tuite's alternative Austen is "Queer Austen": identifying with the "'queering'" of Austen, Tuite aims to defamiliarize Austen's heterosexual plot and the investments and reproductions of patrilineal culture. At the same time, and more problematically, she claims to retrieve Austen from recent revisionary feminist ("liberal-feminist") works of canon formation that have failed to account for the complex ways in which discourses of class and gender mediate each other. She argues that Austen's novels perform the cultural work of "reconceptualizing property relations" across a specific axis of class and gender. Tuite uncovers Austen's contradictory investment in "social mobility" as "cultural capital"; Austen's novels "work on the principle of class compromise, featuring in most cases a bourgeois female subject who is accepted into a paternal aristocratic culture that is then renovated in the process" (171). Tuite's own cultural heritage includes Nancy Armstrong's seminal work on domestic fiction, especially Armstrong's "'paradoxical configuration'" of "'a middle-class aristocracy'" (142-43, 184). While she attempts to refine the political specificity of Armstrong's terms (Austen is the agent of a liberal Toryism rather than a middle-class aristocracy), Tuite does not seem to recognize the now-canonical status of what we might call the "negotiated Austen," that is, the Austen of divided political allegiances which are mediated through her complex investments in gender and class.2
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