Jane Austen’s Romantic Medievalism: Courtly Love and Happy Endings

Jane Austen's work was deeply engaged with the medieval tradition of courtly love and its investment in happy endings, revealing the influence of romance on her narrative style, representations of gender, and complex interest in happiness. This study provides new insights into Austen's narrative style, representations of gender, and complex interest in happiness, as well as her ironic, providentially arranged romances that educate readers into wisdom and joy.

Format: Hardback
Length: 238 pages
Publication date: 28 November 2023
Publisher: Lehigh University Press

Jane Austen's work has often been associated with Georgian refinement and restraint, but this book challenges that notion by revealing her deep engagement with the medieval tradition of courtly love and its emphasis on happy endings. By examining the influence of romance on Persuasion, Emma, and other novels, the study offers new insights into Austen's narrative style, representations of gender, and her complex interest in happiness as both an affective and moral state. Austen reimagines courtly love in her own idiom, portraying women not as fine ladies but as rational creatures. She also draws on the structures of Christian narrative to illuminate the centrality of providence as a virtue that bestows grace on her characters, offering them deliverance and happiness. Austen famously ironizes romance, criticizing emotional excess and downplaying conventionally romantic scenes. However, this study 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. By reframing key ethical and generic conventions of the medieval past, Austen's ironic, providentially arranged romances educate readers into wisdom and joy.

Weight: 544g
Dimension: 237 x 158 x 25 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781611463507