Personal and Political Transformation in the Texts of Jane Austen (Studies in British Literature, 76)

This study addresses the rich array of past and current scholarship and explores a new angle - Jane Austen's idea of personal reform precipitating societal transformation. It presents the ways in which she explores the complex nature of transformation through her inversion of the commonly held definitions of masks, mirrors and mirages - a trio not explored by other scholars and critics. As a subversive conservative, Austen seems most interested in examining the middle space existent in the nature of transformation. This study presents Austen amidst French (rather than English) contemporaries to establish her relationship to national and continental events, and, in exploring how she inverts the definitions of masks, mirrors and mirages, elucidates her political commentary in a new way.