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Palgrave Macmillan

Jane Austen and Religion

Salvation and Society in Georgian England

  • Book
  • © 2002

Overview

Authors:
  1. Michael Giffin
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Part of the book series: Cross Currents in Religion and Culture (CCRC)

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Table of contents (7 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-vii
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  2. The Economy of Salvation

    • Michael Giffin
    Pages 1-36

  3. Northanger Abbey

    • Michael Giffin
    Pages 37-62

  4. Sense and Sensibility

    • Michael Giffin
    Pages 63-91

  5. Pride and Prejudice

    • Michael Giffin
    Pages 92-125

  6. Mansfield Park

    • Michael Giffin
    Pages 126-148

  7. Emma

    • Michael Giffin
    Pages 149-176

  8. Persuasion

    • Michael Giffin
    Pages 177-204

  9. Back Matter

    Pages 205-222
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Keywords

About this book

Jane Austen is often thought of as a secular author, because religion seems absent from her novels, because she satirises her clerical characters, and because history and literacy criticism - and the literary sensibility of the twenty-first century reader - is overwhelmingly secular. Michael Giffin offers a reading of Austen's published novels against the background of a 'long eighteenth century' that stretched from the Restoration to the end of the Georgian period. He demonstrates that Austen is a neoclassical author of the Enlightenment who writes through the twin prisms of British Empiricism and Georgian Anglicanism. His focus is on how Austen's novels mirror a belief in natural law and natural order; and how they reflect John Locke's theory of knowledge through reason, revelation and reflection on experience. His reading suggests there is a thread of neoclassical philosophy and theology running through and between each of Austen's novels, which is best understood in its cultural context.

Reviews

'...original and enlightening...' - Laura Mooneyham White, JASNA News

About the author

MICHAEL GIFFIN is postgraduate course author and supervisor in Literature and Theology at the Sydney College of Divinity. As an author he has published three books of literary criticism as well as several journal articles in Literature and Theology. As an Anglican priest Michael has ministered in parishes, psychiatric hospitals, aged care facilities, hospices, universities and schools and is currently licensed to officiate as a priest within the Diocese of Sydney.

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