The making of Jane Austen -

Devoney Looser

Johns Hopkins University Press

2017

304 páginas

10h 8m

ISBN-13: 9781421422824

Just how did Jane Austen become the celebrity author and the inspiration for generations of loyal fans she is today? Devoney Looser’s The Making of Jane Austen turns to the people, performances, activism, and images that fostered Austen’s early fame, laying the groundwork for the beloved author we think we know.

Here are the Austen influencers, including her first English illustrator, the eccentric Ferdinand Pickering, whose sensational gothic images may be better understood through his brushes with bullying, bigamy, and an attempted matricide. The daring director-actress Rosina Filippi shaped Austen’s reputation with her pioneering dramatizations, leading thousands of young women to ventriloquize Elizabeth Bennet’s audacious lines before drawing room audiences. Even the supposedly staid history of Austen scholarship has its bizarre stories. The author of the first Jane Austen dissertation, student George Pellew, tragically died young, but he was believed by many, including his professor-mentor, to have come back from the dead.

Looser shows how these figures and their Austen-inspired work transformed Austen’s reputation, just as she profoundly shaped theirs. Through them, Looser describes the factors and influences that radically altered Austen’s evolving image. Drawing from unexplored material, Looser examines how echoes of that work reverberate in our explanations of Austen’s literary and cultural power. Whether you’re a devoted Janeite or simply Jane-curious, The Making of Jane Austen will have you thinking about how a literary icon is made, transformed, and handed down from generation to generation.

Resenhas (1)

5 (Perfeito)

"The making of Jane Austen begins with the premise that Austen’s posthumous journey to becoming an icon looks very different when we take the back roads. It looks very different when it’s not narrated by protected collateral descendants or prevailing cultural gatekeepers, by relatives or literati. We get a different history of Austen – author, woman, and works – from perspectives of literary populism, moments of commercial opportunism, or political and cultural clashes."

É exatamente isso. Looser mostra como figuras como George Pellew (autor da primeira dissertação sobre Austen) e Ferdinand Pickering (primeiro ilustrador inglês dos trabalhos da autora) e seus trabalhos inspirados em Austen transformaram a reputação dela, assim como Austen moldou profundamente a deles. Looser descreve os fatores e influências que alteraram radicalmente a imagem em evolução de Austen. Com base em material inexplorado, Looser examina como os ecos desse trabalho repercutem em nossas explicações sobre o poder literário e cultural de Austen.

O livro se divide em três partes: a primeira fala da importância da autora; a segunda aborda as dramatizações de suas obras; e na terceira Looser fala mais do aspecto político, incluindo a inspiração para o movimento feminista (gostei muito desse capítulo). De modo geral, é um livro excelente. Você não precisa ser uma Janeite para ler, mas de qualquer forma, a autora faz com que se reflita sobre como nossa própria ideia de Jane foi construída pelo que nós lemos e vimos adaptado. Livro muito recomendado.