A01=Roger Emerson Moore
abbey
Abbey Precincts
Anglican tradition analysis
Austen novels religious critique
Austen's Death
Austen’s Death
Author_Roger Emerson Moore
Battle Abbeys
Category=DSBF
Category=DSK
Category=QRMB
cultural memory in literature
Domus Dei
English religious history
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Fanny Price
Fine Day
Garrison Chapel
General Tilney
Henry Iii
John Stone
literary heritage studies
Mansfield Park
medieval church architecture
monastic dissolution
northanger
Nostalgic Tradition
Reading Abbey
Resort Town
Richard III
Ruined Abbeys
Sacrilege Narratives
Sea Water
Sixteenth Century Events
Sotherton Court
Trafalgar House
Vice Versa
Whitby Abbeys
White Friars
Young Man
Product details
- ISBN 9781472432834
- Weight: 470g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 28 Dec 2015
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Jane Austen's England was littered with remnants of medieval religion. From her schooling in the gatehouse of Reading Abbey to her visits to cousins at Stoneleigh Abbey, Austen faced constant reminders of the wrenching religious upheaval that reordered the English landscape just 250 years before her birth. Drawing attention to the medieval churches and abbeys that appear frequently in her novels, Moore argues that Austen's interest in and representation of these spaces align her with a long tradition of nostalgia for the monasteries that had anchored English life for centuries until the Reformation. Converted monasteries serve as homes for the Tilneys in Northanger Abbey and Mr. Knightley in Emma, and the ruins of the 'Abbeyland' have a prominent place in Sense and Sensibility. However, these and other formerly sacred spaces are not merely picturesque backgrounds, but tangible reminders of the past whose alteration is a source of regret and disappointment. Moore uncovers a pattern of critique and commentary throughout Austen's works, but he focuses in particular on Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park, and Sanditon. His juxtaposition of Austen's novels with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts rarely acknowledged as relevant to her fiction enlarges our understanding of Austen as a commentator on historical and religious events and places her firmly in the long national conversation about the meaning and consequences of the Reformation.
Roger E. Moore is Principal Senior Lecturer in English and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education in the College of Arts & Science at Vanderbilt University, USA.
