Critical Survey

This issue of Critical Survey derives from a selection of the papers first read at ‘Locations of Austen’, an interdisciplinary and international academic conference which took place at the University of Hertfordshire from 11 to 13 July 2013. These articles represent a modest percentage of the wealth of topics considered over the course of that three-day event, but they nevertheless provide an authentic sense of the eclectic mix of disciplines and intellectual approaches to Austen studies during what proved to be a successful, and most enjoyable, academic forum for scholars of literature, history, film and cultural studies.

This article argues that in Jane Austen's work there is an affiliation between the experience of landscape and the forms that fictional works can take. This is evident in 'Catharine, or the Bower' where an analogy is set up between the reading of a novel and travel through a picturesque landscape, a connection that is returned to in Pride and Prejudice. This affiliation can be contextualized first by reference to Austen's comments in her letters about narrative form, and then by reference to contemporary criticism of the novel, in particular that of Anna Barbauld. Barbauld overtly uses landscape for narratological purposes in her introductory essay to Samuel Richardson's Correspondence, alluding to Uvedale Price's Essay on the Picturesque to extol Richardson's formal achievements in Clarissa. Austen's views on narrative organization and on landscape design strongly resonate with Barbauld's, and both writers evoke the picturesque to provide a formalist critique of the novel.

The idea of 'mental maps' can be used to explore the way in which readers reconstruct place and landscape in Austen's fiction. Notwithstanding valuable research on Austen and landscape, that reconstruction is difficult because Austen seldom describes landscape and we are cut off from her assumptions about it by the reshaping of nature by Romanticism and by the Industrial Revolution. Austen had a practical as well as an aesthetic awareness of land, and sought to represent it accurately. Her interest in the landscape is explored by comparison with William Cobbett. To examine how space and landscape in Austen's novels are reimagined today, the article discusses three films based on them: Sense and Sensibility (1995), and versions of Emma produced by ITV and BBC (1996, 2009). In these films space is readily constructed expressively, psychologically or symbolically, but a dimension of Austen's realism is lost, and is replaced with elements of fantasy.

This article examines Jane Austen's relationship with literary tourism. It argues that Jane Austen tours are more than just a fad that cashes in on Austen-mania, but that they become interactive paratexts which allow glimpses into moments of inspiration which in turn contribute to a new cultural awareness. Literary tourism creates landscapes that can contribute not only to an understanding of a new transnational cultural heritage, but an understanding of self. Literary locations are simultaneously a repository for historical authenticity and a series of imaginative representations of places or things. Today literary tourism may result from readers' desires to connect with the locations of a beloved novel, or find out what Austen was 'really like', but for visitors, historical and modern, the tour inspires travellers to imagine themselves within a particular narrative, whether it be a fictional narrative or a narrative of cultural ideology.

This article explores one of Jane Austen's narrative techniques, focusing on her characters' telling of and writing on their past. To incorporate events that characters experienced at different times or locations, she uses life stories constructed by an individual told in the first person. She relies on the characters' subjective telling of their own life stories at crucial points in the plot, rather than leaving the description to the omniscient narrator. In so doing, she provides fresh ways of reading; she enables the reader to get involved in the narrative by sharing an individual's life story and at the same time she ensures that the reader places the character's narrative at some distance. Her use of this method of stories allows her to follow and develop literary tradition. Inheriting the tradition of the letter-writing generations, she provides a new use of life-story telling and a new way of reading them.

The ability to control where and how any given space will be occupied is a coveted but elusive privilege for the heroines of Jane Austen's novels. Though blessed with an admirable blend of independence of mind, spirit and moral fortitude, they are women for whom the privilege of space is often either an intangible desire or an oppressive reality. In Persuasion, Austen deliberately creates a problem with space. She purposefully contradicts what is expected in public and private behaviour by presenting a heroine who is at first constricted by her place; who begins to expand the number of spaces she is able to occupy; and then, finally, begins to defy her place. This article explores how this use of physical and psychological space in Persuasion evolves and how Austen involves her heroine in the discourse of social change through both narrative description and a new accessibility of psychological landscape.