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There were no reviews of
Mansfield Park when it first appeared in 1814. Austen's reputation grew in the Victorian period, but it was only in the twentieth century that formal and sustained criticism began of this work, which addresses the controversies of its time more than Austen's earlier novels did. Lionel Trilling praised
Mansfield Park for exploring the difficult moral life of modernity; Edward Said brought postcolonial theory to the study of the novel; and twenty-first-century critics scrutinize these and other approaches to build on and go beyond them.
This volume is the third in the MLA
Approaches series to deal with Austen's work (
Pride and Prejudice and
Emma were the subject of the first and second volumes on Austen, respectively). It provides information about editions, film adaptations, and digital resources, and then nineteen essays discuss various aspects of
Mansfield Park, including the slave trade, the theme of reading, elements of tragedy, gift theory, landscape design, moral improvement in the spirit of Samuel Johnson and of the Reformation, sibling relations, card playing, and interpretations of Fanny Price, the heroine, not as passive but as having some control.
Über den Autor / die Autorin
Marcia McClintock Folsom is Professor of Literature and Chair of the Department of Humanities and Writing at Wheelock College in Boston, USA. She is the editor of two MLA
Approaches to Teaching volumes, the ones on teaching Austen's
Pride and Prejudice and
Emma, and she contributed an essay to the MLA's
Approaches to Teaching Woolf's To the Lighthouse. Her essays on Austen have been published in
Persuasions and Persuasions On-Line.
John Wiltshire is Professor Emeritus in English at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of
Samuel Johnson in the Medical World: The Doctor and the Patient; Jane Austen and the Body: "the picture of health"; Recreating Jane Austen; and
The Making of Dr. Johnson. He is the editor of the Cambridge University Press edition of Austen's
Mansfield Park, and co-editor of
The Cinematic Jane Austen: Essays on the Filmic Sensibility of the Novels.
