Abstract
In David Lodge’s novel Changing Places (1975), two Jane Austen scholars, the American Morris Zapp and the British Philip Swallow, take part in an exchange scheme in which they swap jobs, lives and (this being a campus novel, and thus an opportunity for vicarious fantasy versions of academics’ actually rather stolid lives) wives. Zapp, who likes to think of himself as ‘the Austen man’, is an academic superstar, ‘the man who had published articles in PMLA while still at graduate school … who had published five fiendishly clever books (four of them on Jane Austen) by the time he was thirty’,2 and provides a fictional vehicle for the dissemination of Lodge’s more daring Austen criticism by another means. To underline, once and for all, his supremacy in the field, Zapp dreams of producing a ‘total reading’ of Austen’s work. His dreams are megalomaniacal and apocalyptic: he wishes both to end and to become Austen studies, ‘saying everything there was to be said about Jane Austen. The idea was to be utterly exhaustive, to examine the novels from every conceivable angle … so that when each commentary was written, there would be simply nothing further to say about the novel in question.’3 Lodge’s novel is set in 1969, across thinly disguised versions of Birmingham and San Francisco, and partakes powerfully of its recreated times in its depictions of political upheaval both globally and, microcosmically, on university campuses. By this contextualising, Zapp’s total reading is rendered neither intrinsically foolish (it is not just the megalomaniac dream of a narcissist, though Zapp is that too), nor, on the terms given, ultimately realisable.
‘What is all this about Jane Austen? What is there in her? What is it all about?’ (Joseph Conrad, to H. G. Wells1)
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Notes
H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1934), p. 528.
David Lodge, Changing Places (London and Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 15.
Avrom Fleishman, A Reading of Mansfield Park (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967).
Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975, rpt. with a new Introduction, 1987).
Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
Margaret Kirkham, Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction (Brighton: Harvester, 1983);
Alison G. Sulloway, Jane Austen and the Province of Womanhood (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989);
Deborah Kaplan, Jane Austen Among Women (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1992).
Mary Evans, Jane Austen and the State (London: Tavistock, 1987).
Claudia L. Johnson, ‘Austen Cults and Cultures’, in Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 211–26;
John Wiltshire, Recreating Jane Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001);
Roger Sales, Jane Austen and Representations of Regency England (London: Routledge, 1996);
Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield (eds), Jane Austen in Hollywood (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1998);
Deirdre Lynch (ed.), Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Shamela, ed. Arthur Humphreys (London: Dent, 1973), p. 47.
Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), p. 156.
Edward Copeland, Women Writing About Money: Women’s Fiction in England, 1790–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 6.
Ian Littlewood (ed.), Jane Austen: Critical Assessments, 4 vols (Mountfield: Helm Information, 1998), 1: 288.
John Sutherland, Victorian Novelists and Publishers (London: Athlone Press, 1976).
Barbara M. Benedict, ‘Sensibility by the Numbers: Austen’s Work as Regency Popular Fiction’, in Deirdre Lynch (ed.), Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 82.
Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
David Spring, ‘Interpreters of Jane Austen’s Social World: Literary Critics and Historians’, in Janet Todd (ed.), Jane Austen: New Perspectives (New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1983), pp. 53–72.
W. H. Auden, ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, in Collected Poems (London: Faber, 1976), p. 79.
Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 9.
William Patrick Day, In the Circles of Fear and Desire: A Study of Gothic Fantasy (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 80.
Diane Long Hoeveler, Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Genders from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998).
D. A. Miller, Narrative and its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. xi.
Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Hogarth Press, 1992), p. 87.
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 33–4.
Emily Lawless, Maria Edgeworth (London: Macmillan, 1904), p. 99.
F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 9.
Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War Volume 5: Closing the Ring (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1951), p. 425.
See Claudia L. Johnson, Women, Politics and the Novel (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 1–27, for an influential analysis of this.
John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 5.
Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1700–1837 (London: Vintage, 1996), p. 303.
C. W. Pasley, Essay on the Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire, 4th edn (London: T. Egerton, 1813), p. 42.
Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
Fiona Stafford, The Last of the Race: The Growth of a Myth from Milton to Darwin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
Norman Davies, The Isles: A History (Basingstoke: Macmillan–now Palgrave Macmillan, 1999).
Tom Nairn, After Britain: New Labour and the Return of Scotland (London: Granta, 2001), pp. 128, 154.
Richard Weight, Patriots: National Identity in Britain 1940–2000 (London and Basingstoke: Pan Macmillan, 2002), pp. 707–8.
Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in David Lodge (ed.), Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader (London: Longman, 1988).
Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. x–xi.
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© 2004 Darryl Jones
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Jones, D. (2004). Introduction. In: Jane Austen. Critical Issues. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-80244-5_1
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