Introduction

Abstract

In her classic essay on ‘Austen cults and cultures’, Claudia L. Johnson explains that its focus is on ‘the uses to which we have put [Austen] and her achievement’.¹ John Wiltshire also invokes the term ‘use’ in his study Recreating Jane Austen, although for him it is a word that ‘oscillates between exploitation and honourable deployment’.² Wiltshire’s comment bears traces of the concern about fidelity that marked earlier analysis of film adaptation and that, as we shall see, has a long history in discussions about translations, adaptations and reworkings of Austen’s texts. However, the contributors to this volume share Deidre Lynch’s conviction that the questions raised by the cultural uses of Jane Austen are more significant and more intriguing than debates over the fidelity or otherwise of individual recreations.³ Austen has for decades been a crossover author, bridging high and low culture, and more recently ‘Jane Austen’ has morphed into a cultural signifier with global recognition. In response to this phenomenon, the essays in this volume explore the values that Austen’s life and works can be made to represent in diverse cultural contexts. They engage too with the history of her literary reputation and with her construction as a canonical author, and examine the long-standing tension that has existed between the responses of her ‘common readers’ (to borrow Virginia Woolf’s term) and the views of the literary-critical establishment, a tension that has been strongly marked by gender.