Jane Austen: Myth, Reality and Global Celebrity
Discover the life and impact of Jane Austen
Jane Austen went from being a moderately successful anonymous novelist in her own time to a global celebrity in ours. On this course you will explore how that happened, exploring Austen’s own literary influences, and her reputation over time.
You will learn about her origins in Hampshire, uncovering her formative years, and the society she lived in, asking how Austen’s location, background and reading influenced her novels. You will also consider the ways her own contemporaries read and responded to her, and her place in the modern canon of world literature today, 200 years after she died.
What topics will you cover?
- The Austen myth: who is she and what does she mean to people around the world?
- An 18th century education: Jane and women’s education and reading
- Austen’s literary and family influences
- Austen’s ‘dirty walks’: gardens and landscapes in Austen’s writing
- The marketing of Jane Austen at home and abroad – how her legacy has endured and built her celebrity
- Austen’s afterlives: adapting Jane Austen for the modern age in film, TV
- Austen as a commodity: portraits, hair and merchandising
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