Janeites: Austen's Disciples and Devotees/The Postcolonial Jane Austen/Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon

Like Claudia Johnson, Galperin is interested in the self-legitimations of Austen criticism, here the tradition established by Scott and Lewes that links realism and projects of social hegemony. In "Austen's Earliest Readers and the Rise of the Janeites," Galperin finds proto-Janeites in Regency readers like Annabella Millbanke and Jane Davy, for whom the truths of the novel's didactic task were not self-evident: these readers were preoccupied with vivid details that could not be assimilated to the instructional model of probabilistic fiction. In "Free and Happy: Jane Austen in America," Mary Favret examines what happened to Austen when she was transplanted in American soil: rather than signifying home as increasingly she did at home in England, in America Austen was all about "freedom and the pursuit of happiness" (168). Favret reveals how, since the time of James Fenimore Cooper, male American citizens have imagined Austen as a sort of female Huck Finn, lighting out for the territory with them and creating a characteristically American space: in the late nineteenth century, advocates of realism and of romance found that Austen validated all sorts of independence. But Favret also notes how Austen's rising appeal was tied to a dream of "racial homogeneity" (179); thus, Austen's American readers "forgot" "race, slavery, and unhappiness" (182) in the consolations of ordinariness. The American reception of Austen is an underexplored terrain-Favret's reading of the refusals imbricated in this particular "national enthusiasm" (182) will be required reading for future scholars.

Elsewhere in the volume, Susan Fraiman, in an essay first published in 1995, argues for the confluence of abolitionist and feminist discourses in Mansfield Park; Clara Tuite offers a queer genealogy of Austen that comprehends Forster, James, and Firbank via discussion of "entailed" literary estates; and Katie Trumpener examines Austen's position as the presiding deity of Virago Press's series of women's fiction. Roger Sales on the representation of servants, notably in the recent adaptation of Persuasion, is oddly unselfconscious about his own discourse in a collection which as a whole offers a cautionary tale to critics about our own investments in Austen.

All three books make a significant contribution to Austen studies, and more broadly to cultural studies of the novel. They ask us to rethink the cultural function of the realist novel at different historical moments and geographical sites. As Lynch argues on behalf of her own collection, their orientation towards the past should not be condemned as regressive nostalgia but as the sign of an empowering desire to reread the past in all its pliability and thus to be able to (re)think the future. Most importantly, and of course to different degrees, the books take the risk of affect, with Lynch's collection most obviously entering the interzone of identification. Lynch offers Miss Bates's account of readerly love as an alternative to Lionel Trilling's disciplinary Austen: '"such a pleasure to her-a letter from Jane-that she can never hear it enough'" (20). Some of the essays in The Postcolonial Jane Austen and many in Janeites take account of and dramatize emotional response, and thus they offer something that exceeds historical contextualization.