Tag Archives: Mansfield Park

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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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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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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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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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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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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Sex, Cable TV and the Ecocidal Moment (and MP)

By chris | Published: 14 October 2009
Let us take these in reverse order, coming back to Mansfield Park. Rowan Williams in a speech in Southark Cathedral to mark an Anglican push on climate change is waving the flag over Alastair McIntosh’s latest book. In his splendid book, Hell and High Water: Climate Change, Hope and the Human Condition, Alastair McIntosh speaks of [...]
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Mansfield Park: Critiques

By chris | Published: 13 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. Critiques This section analyses a selection of critiques of Mansfield Park under six headings. Next: The Moral Law Within
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The Moral Law Within

By chris | Published: 13 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 3.1 The Moral Law Within Everyone agrees that Mansfield Park is an infamously moral book.  ‘One can almost hear the [...]
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Mansfield Park: Volume 3

By chris | Published: 12 October 2009
As I said in a previous post, I have been re-reading Mansfield Park while writing (yet to be completed) the essay on the novel, looking out for signs of the novel going off the boil as other critics have claimed.  Fanny’s genteel horror at her Portsmouth home and relations is very well done, yet Austen [...]
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Williams on the Ethics of War

By chris | Published: 12 October 2009
Henry at Crooked Timber notes how even centrists are contributing to the shouting match that makes up so much of our contemporary intellectual public discourse, pointing out that a little self-knowledge wouldn’t go amiss where one centrist is concerned. Having my head in Mansfield Park at the moment, I could help adding that some more [...]
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The Post-rational Discourse

By chris | Published: 9 October 2009
Henry over at Crooked Timber has posted Centrism as Tribalism on how centrists can be just as strident and aggressive as the partisans.  This is indeed an excellent point! I am especially fond of it because it highlights something I have been saying, that the breakdown in rationality is systemic to our ethics. Henry [...]
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Losing Our Minds

By chris | Published: 8 October 2009
Reading Antti Kauppinen’s ideas on moral philosophy (long version & encapsulation) and Marilyn Butler’s conclusion for Mansfield Park in Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975), I am reminded of a crucial mistake repeatedly made in moral philosophy that I can scarcely believe could be made by anyone with a religious training and commitment [...]
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Mansfield Park: Volume 2

By chris | Published: 6 October 2009
[I am in the middle of writing an essay on Mansfield Park for this blog.  I had hoped to complete it last weekend, with only the conclusion to complete, but of course it keeps receding. I seem to have the conclusion half completed, but I expect to spend a while polishing. I am probably going [...]
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Classic Novels

By chris | Published: 6 October 2009
Following my previous posts on the subject Matt Yglesias has done a bloggingheads.tv segment where he continues to muse, despite being glad he read classic novels in his youth, whether reading them can really be justified given time needed and all the available options. As I said before, The Onion may have the key insight here.
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Mansfield Park: update, discussion and requests

By chris | Published: 1 October 2009
I have finally written the main section of my essay on Mansfield Park.  I will have to transfer it onto the blog, fill out the references and write the concluding section.  I will be busy this evening and tomorrow, so I expect it will appear on Sunday.  In the meantime I expect to be posting [...]
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