Tag Archives: Jane Austen

Realistic Optimists and That David Brooks Column

By chris | Published: 10 November 2009
Tyler Cowen has a great TEDxMidAtlantic talk on the seductive power of stories to distort our view of the world. We compulsive structure our understanding with narratives–there is no point in fighting this–but we can take a light, sceptical approach to these narratives, continually probing them for weaknesses. (Does anyone else see common thread with [...]
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Blog News

By chris | Published: 8 November 2009
Mansfield Park Essay Completed The Mansfield Park essay is now completed and I have placed a full table of contents at the head of each post. Originally I had intended to just expand on an earlier sketch of  my views on the novel, and the Introduction and Method sections were written in this frame of mind. [...]
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Diminutive Greatness and Fanny Price

By chris | Published: 7 November 2009
This post is the final part of an essay on Mansfield Park, being posted in instalments. Mansfield Park Preface Introduction Method Critiques The Moral Law Within Fanny and Edmund The Crawfords Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram Mrs Norris The Quiet Thing Enlightenment Kantian Deontology King Lear Romanticism The Satirical Inheritance Conclusion Epilogue: Diminutive Greatness & Fanny Price Epilogue: Diminutive Greatness & Fanny Price We have re-read them all four times; or rather, to speak more [...]
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The Rise of the Novel

By chris | Published: 5 November 2009
[While writing the conclusion for the Mansfield Park essay (which I am about to post) I realised that it relies on an assumption that may not be widely shared--that the rise of the realistic novel in the 18th century was a significant factor in the development of modern thought--so I will discuss it here first.] The [...]
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Scott on Emma

By chris | Published: 4 November 2009
This post is part of my series of posts looking at the impact of the novel on Enlightenment ethics. It follows the previous post giving Johnson’s view of the realistic novel set out in The Rambler No 4. The publisher of Emma, John Murray, asked Walter Scott to review the novel, which appeared anonymously in the [...]
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Johnson on the Realistic Novel

By chris | Published: 4 November 2009
As part of my enquiries in into the impact of the modern realistic novel on Enlightenment (in preparation for the conclusion of the Mansfield Park essay) I am reproducing the text of Samuel Johnson’s Rambler No. 4 (31st March 1750, taken from here). It is widely assumed to be a response to the publication of [...]
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Nihilism

By chris | Published: 2 November 2009
Aidan has written a splendid and thoughtful comment on the Blog News post that is really a whole article in itself. I recommend everyone read it. I am particularly grateful for it because while there is much in it I agree with it also essays a very interesting criticism, that goes to the heart of [...]
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The Satirical Inheritance

By chris | Published: 30 October 2009
This post is part of an essay on Mansfield Park, being posted in instalments. Mansfield Park Preface Introduction Method Critiques The Moral Law Within Fanny and Edmund The Crawfords Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram Mrs Norris The Quiet Thing Enlightenment Kantian Deontology King Lear Romanticism The Satirical Inheritance Conclusion Epilogue: Diminutive Greatness & Fanny Price 4.4. The Satirical Inheritance Ian Watt has shown how Burney and then Austen unified the realism of assessment, Fielding’s comic [...]
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King Lear

By chris | Published: 30 October 2009
This post is part of an essay on Mansfield Park, being posted in instalments. Mansfield Park Preface Introduction Method Critiques The Moral Law Within Fanny and Edmund The Crawfords Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram Mrs Norris The Quiet Thing Enlightenment Kantian Deontology King Lear Romanticism The Satirical Inheritance Conclusion Epilogue: Diminutive Greatness & Fanny Price 4.2. King Lear Seneca also wrote nine tragedies on Greek mythological subjects, more designed to be recited or read than [...]
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Ritter on Obama

By chris | Published: 30 October 2009
In the earlier article on Afghanistan I quoted Ritter’s ‘fierce’ analysis of the situation facing President Obama. It is also remarkable for a fierce judgement of Obama (quoted below) should he ignore his Vice President and escalate the US commitment by agreeing to McChrytal’s request for 40,000 extra soldiers. Such clarity in ethical matters [...]
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Blog News

By chris | Published: 30 October 2009
A New Tag Line I have cleaned up the tag line of the blog. I am pretty sure that it is an accident that it comes out at exactly the same length as the main title. Mansfield Park Essay The Mansfield Park essay is proceeding much more slowly that I anticipated. I am not sure that this is [...]
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Kantian Deontology

By chris | Published: 29 October 2009
This post is part of an essay on Mansfield Park, being posted in instalments. Mansfield Park Preface Introduction Method Critiques The Moral Law Within Fanny and Edmund The Crawfords Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram Mrs Norris The Quiet Thing Enlightenment Kantian Deontology King Lear Romanticism The Satirical Inheritance Conclusion Epilogue: Diminutive Greatness & Fanny Price 4.1. Kantian Deontology deontology. The ethical theory taking duty as the basis of morality; the view that some acts are [...]
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Twain on Austen

By chris | Published: 28 October 2009
“I haven’t any right to criticize books, but I don’t do it except when I hate them.  I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader, and therefore I have to stop every time I begin.  Every time I read “Pride and [...]
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Preface to Mansfield Park

By chris | Published: 28 October 2009
This post is the first part of an essay on Mansfield Park, being posted in instalments. Mansfield Park Preface Introduction Method Critiques The Moral Law Within Fanny and Edmund The Crawfords Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram Mrs Norris The Quiet Thing Enlightenment Kantian Deontology King Lear Romanticism The Satirical Inheritance Conclusion Epilogue: Diminutive Greatness & Fanny Price Preface Philosophy is hard. In the Buddhist tradition meditation practitioners are warned that they must engage in study [...]
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Fiction and Reality

By chris | Published: 26 October 2009
Frank Rich had a great piece on the balloon-boy fiasco in Sunday’s Times. Richard Heene is the inevitable product of this reigning culture, where “news,” “reality” television and reality itself are hopelessly scrambled and the warp-speed imperatives of cable-Internet competition allow no time for fact checking. Norman Lear, about the only prominent American to express [...]
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Management Science

By chris | Published: 22 October 2009
Well, I promised myself I’d finish this before the sequel appeared in the shops, and the conclusion has been made, shall we say, somewhat easier by the fact that the burden of my conclusion – that there is something terribly, horribly wrong with the state of modern economics – has become somewhat of an open [...]
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Enlightenment

By chris | Published: 21 October 2009
This post is part of an essay on Mansfield Park, being posted in instalments. Mansfield Park Preface Introduction Method Critiques The Moral Law Within Fanny and Edmund The Crawfords Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram Mrs Norris The Quiet Thing Enlightenment Kantian Deontology King Lear Romanticism The Satirical Inheritance Conclusion Epilogue: Diminutive Greatness & Fanny Price 4. Enlightenment In Sense and Sensibility Austen showed that the Hume’s declaration in the Treatise that ‘reason is, and ought [...]
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The Quiet Thing

By chris | Published: 18 October 2009
This post is part of an essay on Mansfield Park, being posted in instalments. Mansfield Park Preface Introduction Method Critiques The Moral Law Within Fanny and Edmund The Crawfords Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram Mrs Norris The Quiet Thing Enlightenment Kantian Deontology King Lear Romanticism The Satirical Inheritance Conclusion Epilogue: Diminutive Greatness & Fanny Price 3.6 The Quiet Thing I bring depression into the picture partly because Jane Austen does, in one of her novels, [...]
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Free Will, Super Freakocide and Mansfield Park

By chris | Published: 18 October 2009
(See below for updates.) Horgan on Free Will On his blog at the Centre for Science Writing ,John Horgan has been looking at Free Will, ethics and science, his latest post skewering an Einstein quote using a quintessential classical physics analogy (lunar orbits) to suggest that Free Will is an illusion. I agree with John’s broad thesis, about [...]
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Mrs Norris

By chris | Published: 17 October 2009
This post is part of an essay on Mansfield Park, being posted in instalments. Mansfield Park Preface Introduction Method Critiques The Moral Law Within Fanny and Edmund The Crawfords Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram Mrs Norris The Quiet Thing Enlightenment Kantian Deontology King Lear Romanticism The Satirical Inheritance Conclusion Epilogue: Diminutive Greatness & Fanny Price 3.5 Mrs Norris “If I had known you were going out, I should have got you just to go as [...]
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Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram

By chris | Published: 16 October 2009
This post is part of an essay on Mansfield Park, being posted in instalments. Mansfield Park Preface Introduction Method Critiques The Moral Law Within Fanny and Edmund The Crawfords Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram Mrs Norris The Quiet Thing Enlightenment Kantian Deontology King Lear Romanticism The Satirical Inheritance Conclusion Epilogue: Diminutive Greatness & Fanny Price 3.4 Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram Mr. Yates was beginning now to understand Sir Thomas’s intentions, though as far as [...]
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Notes on Completing Mansfield Park

By chris | Published: 16 October 2009
This is a last of a sporadic series of posts logging my thoughts as I reread Mansfield Park (spurred by the writing of the essay). Critics often think that Austen was easy on Lady Bertram, but the Portsmouth section really isn’t very kind to her. Her ‘a very creditable, common-place, amplifying style’ of letter [...]
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The Crawfords

By chris | Published: 15 October 2009
This post is part of an essay on Mansfield Park, being posted in instalments. Mansfield Park Preface Introduction Method Critiques The Moral Law Within Fanny and Edmund The Crawfords Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram Mrs Norris The Quiet Thing Enlightenment Kantian Deontology King Lear Romanticism The Satirical Inheritance Conclusion Epilogue: Diminutive Greatness & Fanny Price 3.3 The Crawfords Worse still, because more vital in the book, is her constant deliberate weighting of the balance against [...]
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Fanny and Edmund

By chris | Published: 15 October 2009
This post is part of an essay on Mansfield Park, being posted in instalments. Mansfield Park Preface Introduction Method Critiques The Moral Law Within Fanny and Edmund The Crawfords Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram Mrs Norris The Quiet Thing Enlightenment Kantian Deontology King Lear Romanticism The Satirical Inheritance Conclusion Epilogue: Diminutive Greatness & Fanny Price 3.2 Fanny and Edmund prig noun a self-righteously moralistic person Compact Oxford English Dictionary In any assessment of Mansfield Park it is important [...]
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Thought Crimes

By chris | Published: 14 October 2009
Over at Crooked Timber, Henry has kicked off an interesting discussion of the importance of intent in the law, based on the US conservative legislator John Boehner’s accusing liberals of thought crimes. “All violent crimes should be prosecuted vigorously, no matter what the circumstance,” Boehner argued. “The Democrats’ ‘thought crimes’ legislation, however, places a higher value [...]
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