Jane Austen and Religion: Salvation and Society in Georgian England

By Michael Giffin

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0333948084
• ISBN13: 9780333948088
• Release Date: September 2002
• Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
• Length: 222 Pages
• Weight: 1.01 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.3" x 8.5"