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The idealist Austen
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DOI：10.1080/0950236x.2026.2651630.png)
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Abstract
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For historians of literary criticism, it is a truth universally acknowledged that the novels of Jane Austen played a crucial role in the institutionalisation of Novel Studies in the Anglo-American academy. As Claudia Johnson has shown, moreover, that process involved a power struggle between two types of Austen readers: on one side, the new, 'serious' critics (D. W. Harding, L. C. Knights, F.R. and Q.D. Leavis); on the other, the 'Janeites' (A.C. Bradley, Lord David Cecil, R.W. Chapman) - a privileged cohort of publishers, professors, and literati whose 'militantly dotty enthusiasm' for 'their divine Jane' dominated both Oxbridge literary education and the Royal Society of Literature in the early twentieth century. If scholars like Johnson have examined in detail the professional, sexual, and class politics of this conflict, however, they have overlooked an important aspect of its intellectual history: namely, the importance of idealism - especially the British idealism associated with (among others) Thomas Hill Green, F.H. Bradley, and Bernard Bosanquet - in the Janeite milieu. This paper aims to restore this missing context for the rise of 'Academic English' and the place of Novel Studies within it, showing how familiar critical approaches to Austen's fiction and to 'the Novel' more broadly first developed in a complex, negative relation to idealist conceptions of literary character and the work of art.
Keywords:
Jane Austen
history of English studies
theory of the novel
idealism
comedy