The Postcolonial Jane Austen

Jane Austen has proved to be one of the most accessible and enduring legacies of Western culture in the last two hundred years. As a cultural icon, as well as an object of serious intellectual investigation, 'Jane Austen' has influenced the critical understanding of and the popular imagination around social relations and cultural rituals - the institution of marriage, the ideology of romantic relationship, the cultural imagining of class, or social prestige - as well as larger historical pictures that include slavery and colonialism. This cutting-edge volume brings together works by Jane Austen scholars and experts in film studies, postcolonial studies and feminism from four different continents. Their essays investigate the ways in which travelling theories and narratives are reinterpreted and translated in the global context; explore how cultural representations affect the ways social relations are reordered and conceptual boundaries are realigned; and the ways that gender operates in the discourses ofnationalism, colonialism and postcoloniality. This book is the first to bridge two significant bodies of recent Austen scholarship: one emphasising the issue of gender and one centralising the history of colonialism and slavery. It reveals the presence of Austen in India, Korea, and the United States as well as the influence of 'the Other' in Jane Austen's 'known community.' For students and researchers in literary, postcolonial, media and gender studies, this book provides a groundbreaking reappraisal of classical literature using postcolonial methodology.