Jane Austen and the Popular Novel: The Determined Author

Criticism has traditionally fixed Austen's oeuvre within the ideological locus of the 1790s, ignoring the more topical attributes that her novels display. Such accounts have consequently neglected the complex engagements that took place between Austen's fiction and early nineteenth-century fiction. Informed by a macrocosmic sense of the Romantic-era novel market and a microcosmic analysis of intertexual dynamics, Jane Austen and the Popular Novel provides a fresh and alternative perspective on the mature fiction of Jane Austen.