Bitch In a Bonnet: Reclaiming Jane Austen From the Stiffs, the

Bitch In a Bonnet: Reclaiming Jane Austen From the Stiffs, the Snobs, the Simps and the Saps (Volume 1)

Novelist Rodi (Fag Hag, The Sugarman Bootlegs) launches a broadside against the depiction of Jane Austen as a â€œa womanâ€™s writerâ€¦quaint and darling, doe-eyed and demure, parochial if not pastoral, and dizzily, swooningly romantic â€” the inventor and mother goddess of â€˜chick lit.â€™â€ Instead he sees her as â€œa sly subversive, a clear-eyed social Darwinist, and the most unsparing satirist of her centuryâ€¦ She takes sharp, swift swipes at the social structure and leaves it, not lethally wounded, but shorn of it prettifying garb, its flabby flesh exposed in all its naked grossness. And then she laughs.â€ In this volume, which collects and amplifies two-and-a-half yearsâ€™ worth of blog entries, he combs through the first three novels in Austenâ€™s canon â€” Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Mansfield Park â€” with the aim of charting her growth as both a novelist and a humorist, and of shattering the notion that sheâ€™s a romantic of any kind (â€œWeddings bore her, and the unrelenting vulgarity of our modern wedding industry â€” which strives to turn each marriage ceremony into the kind of blockbuster apotheosis that makes grand opera look like a campfire sing along â€” would appall her into derisive laughterâ€).

â€œHilariousâ€¦Rodiâ€™s title is a tribute. Heâ€™s angry that the Austen craze has defanged a novelist whoâ€™s â€˜wicked, arch, and utterly merciless. She skewers the pompous, the pious, and the libidinous with the animal glee of a natural-born sadistâ€™â€¦Like Rodi, I believe Austen deserves to join the grand pantheon of gadflies: Voltaire and Swift, Twain and Mencken.â€ Lev Raphael, The Huffington Post
Country USA
Binding Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate 2013-11-13
Format Kindle eBook

Country	USA
Binding	Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate	2013-11-13
Format	Kindle eBook

Bitch In a Bonnet: Reclaiming Jane Austen From the Stiffs, the Snobs, the Simps and the Saps (Volume 1)

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