front cover of Constancy and the Ethics of Jane Austen's 'Mansfield Park'
Constancy and the Ethics of Jane Austen's 'Mansfield Park'
Joyce Kerr Tarpley
Catholic University of America Press, 2010
Constancy and the Ethics of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park offers a rigorous philosophical examination of the novel, the first book-length, close reading to do so.
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Mansfield Park
An Annotated Edition
Jane Austen
Harvard University Press, 2016

Jane Austen’s most ambitious novel, Mansfield Park, has always generated debate. Austen herself noted that debate when she conducted a reader survey, recording her acquaintances’ mixed reviews in a booklet she entitled “Opinions of Mansfield Park.” Is this novel’s dutiful heroine, Fanny Price, admirable? Or is she (as Austen’s own mother asserted) “insipid”? Is Fanny actually the heroine, or does that title belong more properly to her rival, Mary Crawford? Does Fanny’s uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, act as her benefactor, or as a domestic tyrant? In her notes and introduction to this final volume in Harvard’s celebrated annotated Austen series, Deidre Shauna Lynch outlines the critical disagreements Mansfield Park has sparked and suggests that Austen’s design in writing the novel was to highlight, not downplay, the conflicted feelings its plot and heroine can inspire.

Lynch also engages head-on with the novel’s experimentalism, its technical virtuosity, and its undiminished capacity, two centuries later, to disturb and to move. Annotations clarify the nuances of Austen’s language and explain the novel’s literary allusions and its engagements with topical controversies over West Indian slavery and the conduct of Britain’s war against France. The volume’s numerous illustrations enable readers to picture the world Mansfield Park’s characters inhabit, underscoring the novel’s close attention to setting and setting’s impact on character.

Mansfield Park: An Annotated Edition opens up facets of the novel for even devoted Janeites while extending an open hand to less experienced readers. It will be a welcome addition to the shelf of any library.

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A Reading of Mansfield Park
An Essay in Critical Synthesis
Avrom Fleishman
University of Minnesota Press, 1967
A Reading of Mansfield Park was first published in 1967.Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park has been examined in a number of scholarly contexts and has been vigorously debated according to divergent ethical and political views. In this new study of the work, Professor Fleishman provides a full and unified reading of the novel by employing methods and synthesizing insights drawn from several fields of knowledge - history and sociology, psychology, and cultural anthropology. By combining several perspectives within a single study, he attempts to avoid the pitfalls of partial readings.After an introductory discussion of his method in relation to current trends in literary criticism, the author reviews past criticism of Mansfield Park. In the chapters which follow he discusses the novel’s historical background and its response to social, political, and economic issues of the day; the psychological structure of the characters and its bearing on an ethical evaluation of them; and the mythological parallels which, he finds, impart a sound framework and universal significance to the plot. In the final chapter he places the work within the tradition of English fiction, in an effort to estimate its enduring value.
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