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Austen and Osterhammel: The Transformation of the World and the Novel in the Nineteenth Century

With a focus on Jane Austen’s concept-novels (Sense and Sensibility ; Pride and Prejudice ; Persuasion), I argue that Persuasion binds them into a trilogy, and is this trilogy’s conclusion ; also, I argue that Persuasion carries Austen’s theory of the novel to the extreme, until theory has been given up for the novel and betrayed. In Persuasion, the Napoleonic Wars are to Austen’s novel what Mr. Darcy is to Elizabeth Bennet: a foreign body that the novel learns to accommodate in terms of education, intimacy and eroticism until the novel itself, or the novel’s self, has been given up for the relation it has forged. It is thus not merely to history that Austen relinquishes the education of the novel in Persuasion ; it is to the history of revolution, or perhaps to history as revolution. Austen implies that global history in the nineteenth century may have no other viable rationale, and that the novel is how this rationale, as well as the rationality that subtends it, is negotiated.

Jane Austen ; the novel ; the nineteenth century ; global history ; Jürgen Osterhammel

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