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Discover the life and impact of Jane Austen
Jane Austen went from being a moderately successful anonymous novelist in her own time to a global celebrity in ours. On this course you will explore how that happened, exploring Austen’s own literary influences, and her reputation over time.
You will learn about her origins in Hampshire, uncovering her formative years, and the society she lived in, asking how Austen’s location, background and reading influenced her novels. You will also consider the ways her own contemporaries read and responded to her, and her place in the modern canon of world literature today, 200 years after she died.
This course is for anyone with an interest in Jane Austen, including the members of Jane Austen Societies in North America, Japan, Brazil and many European countries. You will need a basic knowledge of her novels.
Learners may be interested in the Master of Arts in Jane Austen offered by the University of Southampton.
Overview
Syllabus
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- Education and reading
- Welcome
- An 18th Century education
- What would Austen have read?
- Summary activities
- Influences and afterlives
- Introduction to week 2
- Influences on Austen: the arts
- Influences on Austen: money and capital
- Biography: how Austen was described to the world
- Summary activities
- Adaptation and Legacy
- Welcome to week 3
- Austen in translation: from Chawton to the world
- Adaptations of Austen
- Telling Austen's story
- Summary activities
- Closing words
