Research Catalog

Title

Jane Austen and modernization : sociological readings / James Thompson.

Author

Thompson, James, 1951-

Publication

New York, NY : Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Supplementary Content

Cover image

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Details

Description

x, 211 pages; 23 cm

Summary

"This study draws on the classic sociological work of Durkheim, Weber, Simmel, and Goffman to explore small group interaction in the six novels of Jane Austen. These early sociologists share with Austen the same object of knowledge, and that is sociation, small group interaction, and the self / society dialectic. All five are concerned with the problem of belonging, that is, social cohesion. Austen returns again and again to the contradictions of individual will and social obligation. It is now clear that Austen became the important writer that she is today during the years that sociology was establishing itself as the discipline to understand a new social formation, the result of urbanization, industrialization, secularization, massification--an recognizable society. Writers across the later nineteenth century wrote as if everything around them was changing, such that they no longer recognized the social formation in which they lived. Durkheim's key concept, anomie, that sense of individual rulelessness, embodies the observation that late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century society was becoming increasingly unglued. Hence the search, for that glue, for some understanding of shared ritual that would bind separate individuals into a coherent whole. Austen's novels, I argue, became so valuable across this period precisely because they served at one and the same time as recognition of the phenomenon of anomie and as a remedy for it. "--

Subjects

• Austen, Jane, 1775-1817 > Criticism and interpretation
• Literature and society > England > History > 19th century
• Sociology in literature

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (pages 203-208) and index.

Contents

One. Introduction: Jane Austen and Modernization -- Two. Authority in Mansfield Park and Persuasion: Durkheim, Weber, and Parsons -- Three. Emma, Simmel, and Sociability -- Four. Pride and Prejudice, Goffman, and Strategic Interaction -- Five. Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Frame Analysis -- Six. Conclusion: History, Sociology, and Literature.

Call Number

JFD 15-1063

ISBN

• 9781137496010
• 1137496010

LCCN

2014033394

OCLC

890621902

Author

Thompson, James, 1951- author.

Title

Jane Austen and modernization : sociological readings / James Thompson.

Publisher

New York, NY : Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Edition

First edition.

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references (pages 203-208) and index.

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Research Call Number

JFD 15-1063