Back to The Globe
Featured Literary Criticism
Jane Austen’s Romantic Medievalism
While Jane Austen is often regarded as an author who embodies Georgian refinement and restraint, this book argues that her work was deeply engaged with the medieval tradition of courtly love and its investment in happy endings.
Your reading world on The Globe
Discover your next book. Keep the ones that matter.
Join The Globe for a free reader profile and discover books, writers and stories in one place.
About the book
About Jane Austen’s Romantic Medievalism
While Jane Austen is often regarded as an author who embodies Georgian refinement and restraint, this book argues that her work was deeply engaged with the medieval tradition of courtly love and its investment in happy endings. Revealing the influence of romance on Persuasion, Emma, and other novels, this study provides new insights into Austen’s narrative style, representations of gender, and complex interest in happiness as both an affective and moral state. As Austen reimagines courtly love in her own idiom, she upends traditional gender roles, portraying women not as fine ladies but as rational creatures. Drawing on the structures of Christian narrative, she also illuminates the centrality of providence as a virtue that bestows grace on her characters, offering them deliverance and happiness. To be sure, Austen famously ironizes romance, criticizing emotional excess and downplaying conventionally romantic scenes. This study nonetheless finds creative power in her irony, showing how Austen’s critique of romance is rooted in the paradoxes of Christian theology, which allow for both human suffering and divine order. In reframing key ethical and generic conventions of the medieval past, Austen’s ironic, providentially arranged romances educate readers into wisdom and joy.
Reader conversation
Discuss this book
Are you the author or publisher?
Claim this page to verify the book information, add an author profile, update purchase links or request removal.