Jane Austen and the Fiction of Culture

In the past decade, the relationship between literature and anthropology has become an important focus of interdisciplinary concern. The book takes the body of work as a major novelist as the basis for rethinking ethnographic representation and cross-cultural analysis. Authors Handler and Segal have approached Jane Austen's writing as a source for interpreting the cultural ideology of kinship, social rank, courtship and marriage in Austen's England. Arguing against the conventional reading of Austen as portrayer and upholder of a well-ordered society, they evaluate the rhetorical techniques that make Austen an effective ethnographer of diverse, though intertwined, social realities. They compare her writing to the work of other social theorists of her time. (Burke, Wollstonecraft, and Rousseau) and show that Austen undercuts any and all claims to "truth universally acknowledged" - that is, to objective, positive knowledge of human affairs. Their readings of individual scenes from Austen's novels open many new avenues for Austen criticism. The book demonstrates that what was previously taken as "realism" in Austen's novels was in fact her practice of a form of social analysis atttentive to cultural meanings and creativity, communication and miscommunication. The authors invite the reader to confront an ethnographer of another time and place whose insights have a direct bearing on contemporary concerns in the humanities and human sciences. In so doing, they question the canons of narrative and ethnographic realism that have developed in the intervening period.