Talk:Reception history of Jane Austen

Russia

Article could do with more expansion on the general ignorance of Austen in Russia. It's only mentioned briefly and she is not rated highly there. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.104.252.74 (talk) 13:42, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

Which Revolution?

"The questions scholars now investigate involve: "the Revolution, war, nationalism, empire, class, 'improvement' [of the estate], the clergy, town versus country, abolition, the professions, female emancipation; whether her politics were Tory, Whig, or radical; whether she was a conservative or a revolutionary, or occupied a reformist position between these extremes"."

Which Revolution? French? American? Needs to be made clear. I suspect the American revolution is what is meant, as this article has a definite US slant, but it needs clarifying.

I have also removed the identification of FR Leavis and EM Forster as 'British'. Other critics mentioned do not have their nationalities given so I fail to see why these two should be singled out. It smacks rather of a US-centric viewpoint ie treat the US as the default, which should not be the case.86.134.25.190 (talk) 16:06, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

Rajan is referring to the French Revolution (Google book link). I've clarified this in the article. María (yllosubmarine) 18:31, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

Page 101 is missing from that GoogleBooks preview. Therefore, I cannot read what Rajan wrote about "Revolution" and Austen. Do you own the book, María (yllosubmarine) ? Another revolution that was happening in the same period was the Industrial Revolution, which was very disjointing for western culture, especially the quiet rural, agrarian life that Austen wrote about. Thank you, Wordreader (talk) 21:07, 24 July 2015 (UTC)

Hi Wordreader, sadly Maria has retired from editing WP. But I can see that page on google books (g-book page visibility is erratic and can depend on the viewer's location), but just to confirm that Rajan is talking about the French Revolution. Victoria (tk) 21:49, 24 July 2015 (UTC)

Thank you. I was unaware that GoogleBooks returns variable search variations for different searchers. Yours, Wordreader (talk) 03:38, 25 July 2015 (UTC)

20th century reviews do not mention Harold Bloom

I am no literary scholar, but I happened on Harold Bloom's book of the 1990s on the Western Canon The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, and he calls Persuasion the perfect novel, includes a chapter contrasting Jane Austen with Wordsworth. Is he not worth mentioning in a high quality article like this one, in his decade? I do not feel qualified to alter this article, but I do work on the articles on her novels. --Prairieplant (talk) 13:57, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

Agreed. There is a very short note I have added to start things off just before the Edward Said material already in the article. If you would like to adapt this edit and add a sentence or two regarding his book on The Western Canon then you might give it a try. Cheers. Fountains-of-Paris (talk) 14:25, 15 August 2016 (UTC)

• Hi Prairieplant, can you express this differently? It seems incongruous there, and the edit doesn't explain what Bloom meant. The names you included are just part of the chapter title. What does he actually say about Austen and (say) Murasaki Shikibu, and can you add the page numbers?

Regarding "continued Leavis's tradition": is Leavis's view of Austen a "tradition"? SarahSV ^(talk) 20:19, 2 September 2016 (UTC)

SlimVirgin Quotes from Bloom in his 2002 Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Minds follow. All of it is direct quotes from his book, so I did not use quotation marks for the quoted text, rather I put non-quoted words in single square brackets. The title of the section (he avoids the word chapter, but a Lustre seems to me to be a chapter, a uniquely titled part of his book) is complex: IV. Hesed. Lustre 7: John Donne, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Jane Austen, Lady Murasaki, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Jane Brontë, Virginia Woolf, and he speaks of each of those authors in the "Lustre", one by one and also compared them as he saw fit. What Bloom said about Lady Murasaki was picked up in a review of his book by Peter Craven, at http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/12/27/1040511174498.html, who thought that remark alone should have gained the book more than "the niggardly reception" Craven felt it received.

From the text of Bloom's book, first paragraph of Lustre 7 page 259

In Austen, irony becomes a Shakespearean mode of inventiveness, worthy of As You Like It, whose Rosalind is the forerunner of Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice.

[Next paragraph on same page]

The irony of the subtle and elegant Lady Murasaki is the irony of the oxymoronic "splendor of longing" that is so luminous in The Tale of Genji, where longing or incessant desire both vitalizes existence and at last destroys it. John Donne and the Jane Austen of Persuasion would have appreciated Lady Murasaki's splendid longing because they also celebrate the complexities of deferred desire.

page 284 Austen however is Shakespeare's daughter: her heroines defy historicizing contingencies, and are among our rarest images of inward freedom.

page 286 Austen's genius for inventing personality through the agency of her ironical powers could not be more happily illustrated than by this flagship of her achievement. Mr. Collins is one of the comic triumphs of literature: in himself enough to establish Austen's genius forever. Here is Mr. Collins in chapter 19 [of Pride and Prejudice] proposing marriage to Elizabeth Bennet: [followed by quote from her text]

page 287 may have another good quote, but I forgot to write it down to share here.

Is this what you are interested in seeing, a quote like one of the above? If I am to choose the quote, I suppose it would be the one in full about Lady Murasaki (wikilinks to her and her book), and clips from pages 284 and 286 (possibly "Austen is Shakespeare's daughter" and her "genius for inventing personality through the agency of her ironical powers"). I put the mention where I did as it seemed to fit in the time sequence of evaluations of Jane Austen, at the end of the 20th century. I kept it short as I thought a longer segment might not be appreciated. As to Leavis, mention of his views opens the mid-20th century views of her work in this article, and I put my bit at the very end of the section, seeming to close the 20th century commentary (though 2002 slips into the 21st century). Bloom wrote more about Jane Austen than in this one book, as he values Persuasion, her last written & completed novel above the others, which was a new view, I thought, during the 20th century, with so many valuing Pride and Prejudice more highly. Bloom values Pride and Prejudice as seen by his selection of the quotation revealing Mr. Collins so well. Would it be of value to cite another of Bloom's writings on Jane Austen? His book from 1994, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages has a chapter comparing her with Wordsworth, so Bloom was developing his ideas on her and publishing them there. He mentions Persuasion on pages 241-242 (paperback) of that book, which might have worthy quotes about her bringing novels to the Democratic Age also called Romanticism with Persuasion. Quotes from those pages are harder for me to abstract, due to his very different writing style in that book (my view). Maybe something could be taken from these two sentences from page 241 "A conception of inward freedom that centers upon a refusal to accept esteem except from one upon whom one has conferred esteem, is a conception of the highest degree of irony. . . . That high comedy, which continued in Emma, is somewhat chastened in Mansfield Park, and then becomes something else, unmistakable but difficult to name, in Persuasion, where Austen has become so conscious a master that she seems to have changed the nature of willing, as though it, too, could be persuaded to become a rarer, more disinterested act of the self." Bloom rejects the idea that Austen was political in her writing, so his views do not fit in the feminist paragraph. His focus is on her ability to draw a character, and the humor built on irony throughout her novels. Where did you think mention of Bloom's views would sit more logically in the 20th century section? --Prairieplant (talk) 02:36, 4 September 2016 (UTC)

Prairieplant, I see now that you copied the sentences from Fountains-of-Paris, from the last paragraph of this section in an earlier version of Austen. That should be avoided, especially when editing an FA, but when it's done it needs attribution (see Wikipedia:Copying within Wikipedia). I'm going to remove it, in part because it derives from a chapter title, and in part because it doesn't flow from the rest of the paragraph; if you'd like to add something about Bloom's scholarship, perhaps you could summarize it very briefly and we could find a way to make it work. It's worth noting that there was no mention of him in the version that was promoted. SarahSV ^(talk) 21:05, 4 September 2016 (UTC)

The wholly predictable response from you. Sorry to waste your time and mine. --Prairieplant (talk) 04:03, 5 September 2016 (UTC)

You're very welcome to add something from Bloom if you can find a place for it. I agree that The Western Canon might be a better source. But I'm wondering what he said that was new. As for the copying, the point is that the texts have to be read and understood, then we summarize our understanding. That's not happening if someone else's words are copied from another article and a different context. SarahSV ^(talk) 00:55, 6 September 2016 (UTC)

Criticism of Montolieu's supposed translation of Pride and Prejudice

I was reading this (marvellous) article because it had appeared for me on the main page as TFA (prematurely, it is due 21 January). In the section "Nineteenth-century European translations" (even at the time the article was featured[1]) there is quite a bit of reference to Montolieu's supposed translation of Pride and Prejudice citing Cossy, Valérie and Diego Saglia. "Translations". Jane Austen in Context. Ed. Janet Todd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN 0521826446. 171.[2] As I read it, it is the translation in the journal Bibliothèque britannique that Cossy is criticising: Orgueil et Préjugé.[3] It may be that this translation is anonymous.[4] So far as I can see Montolieu translated only Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility. Cossy has also written here. I would have simply changed the name of the translator except she is discussed in some detail in the paragraph and to some extent the content clashes with what is in the next paragraph starting "A study of other important dimensions of the French translations" which was added after the article had been featured but which I suspect is on target. Trying to edit and reconcile the remarks about critics of Austen's translators (!) is way too far outside my abilities so I hope someone can come to the rescue. I'm now reading on ... Thincat (talk) 20:56, 12 January 2019 (UTC)

Despite my reticence above I have gone ahead and changed the article. Please revert or change further. Thincat (talk) 22:08, 12 January 2019 (UTC)

I'm not at all happy that the "translations" section is balanced or even coherent. I've found a recent paper https://ddd.uab.cat/pub/quaderns/quaderns_a2018n25/quaderns_a2018n25p15.pdf that considers both Cossy's and Russell's work and it may help someone pull the section into shape. Of the early translations maybe it is only that of Persuasion by Montolieu that was sensitive to some nuance and, even then, rather specifically to "free independent discourse". Thincat (talk) 23:06, 12 January 2019 (UTC)

Template usage

Among other things, Template:Main states it is intended to be used " to link to the subtopic article that has been summarized" (bolding mine) ... Use of this template should be restricted to the purposes described above." Jane Austen is not the subtopic, this article is. Plus, as I have already stated in my edit comment, "It is not to be used as a substitute for inline links" (bolding not mine). Clarityfiend (talk) 22:30, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

I don't know what "inline links" you believe the hatnote to serve as a "substitute" for. Your first edit summary suggested your position was based on WP:OVERLINK in that Jane Austen was already linked in the WP:LEAD. These are exact opposite positions.

In any case, the lead summarizes the article, so its content, including links, will by definition duplicate (overlap) the rest of the article. OVERLINK is thus not an issue between the lead and the body. The hatnote also does not substitute for any inline link in article prose, and if you feel an inline link is missing then do feel free to add one.

But ultimately, the relevant reference here is summary style (MoS). This article uses summary style for the (biographical) "Background" section: it summarizes the aspects of Austen's biography from Jane Austen that are relevant for this article. And per WP:SS, this is indicated using a hatnote. WP:SS also operates per section, not per article, so which article is the one with the widest topic doesn't really matter. It's just that the examples in WP:SS deal with the most common case, the one where more detailed material has to be split out from a more general article out of WP:SIZE concerns. From the point of view of the "Background" section in this article, Jane Austen is the sub-article even though it is a wider topic. --Xover (talk) 07:27, 23 January 2019 (UTC)

The inline link is Jane Austen, of course. And your notion that her's is the subtopic is cringeworthy. Clarityfiend (talk) 08:20, 23 January 2019 (UTC)

Requested move 8 May 2021

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: No consensus for any particular standard here (bit of a WP:TRAINWRECK, feel free to start a broader RfC or to nominate these individually. (closed by non-admin page mover) Elli (talk | contribs) 06:10, 19 May 2021 (UTC)

---

• Reception of J. R. R. Tolkien → ?
• Reception history of Jane Austen → ?
• Reception of Johann Sebastian Bach's music → ?

– These articles revolve around the same basic idea, and per WP:CONSISTENT, it makes sense to standardize them. Below is a list of possibilities; feel free to add additional ones. They range from a focus on WP:CONCISE to a focus on WP:PRECISE, and all are WP:RECOGNIZABLE and arguably WP:NATURAL. Aza24 (talk) 04:50, 8 May 2021 (UTC)

1. Reception of [name]
2. Reception history of [name]
3. Reception of [name]'s works
4. Reception of [name]'s [kind of works]
5. Reception of the works of [name]
6. Reception of the [kind of works] of [name]

Aza24 (talk) 04:50, 8 May 2021 (UTC)

Comments

• 3, second choice 4— I would say that "history" is implied (2) and the name alone (1) might be mislead readers that the article is referring to the person's character, and is vague. There seems no reason to specify the type of work being discussed (though that seems the second-best option if three is undesirable to others) and it would be sensible to find some uniformity here. I will admit however, that no option really stands out as blatantly obvious to me. Aza24 (talk) 04:57, 8 May 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose one-rule-fits-all: these should be discussed on a case-by-case basis, and there's no reason to see them as a series with similar article titles. Too much of a WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS argument for not directly related articles. I'm perfectly fine with Reception of Johann Sebastian Bach's music and have no strong opinion about the others:
  • Reception of Johann Sebastian Bach's music – not really the same topic as Reception of Johann Sebastian Bach: a reception history of Johann Sebastian Bach, the person, could be written (there is some material about that, but is already mostly covered by the biographical article about the composer), but that's not the topic of the current article about the reception of his music (which has little to do with what, e.g., commentators have been saying about the composer's character). The current article title has more precision about the topic covered in it.
  • Also Austen and Tolkien, while both in the realm of literature, are maybe not that similar: Austen has a reception history spanning two centuries; the reception of Tolkien is much more recent, so I don't see a reason why the respective article titles should have the same mold.

--Francis Schonken (talk) 06:28, 8 May 2021 (UTC)

• You do realize that just as "Reception of Johann Sebastian Bach" can be seen as Bach the person, the current titles for the Austen and Tolkien can be as well? A blanket oppose doesn't seem to be aligned with your actual views here, I'm surprised you didn't consider #4, at the least. Aza24 (talk) 00:11, 9 May 2021 (UTC)
  • A blanket oppose is in line with my views: there is no "series" calling for a WP:CONSISTENT article titling scheme. If any of these articles need to change name that should be proposed on a case-by-case basis. No, Reception of Johann Sebastian Bach's music should not be renamed to Reception of Johann Sebastian Bach's works. That would be quite counterproductive. For clarity: in scholarship, what is now called "Reception of Johann Sebastian Bach's music" in Wikipedia, is often called simply "Bach reception" (which, in scholarship, is indeed about the reception of the composer's music, not about the reception of his person). That would be my second choice for the article title, but when I initiated the article I did not choose that shorter title while too ambiguous in Wikipedia surroundings: there are too many Bachs (including e.g. this one) – "reception" articles all in all not being very common (you found no more than three when starting this RM) I thought at the time that a full descriptive title would be best. But I do think it possible that, over time (when, for instance, in the future there would be a few hundred "reception" articles in Wikipedia), the article would move to "Bach reception" (which is consistent with scholarship), but never to "Reception of Johann Sebastian Bach's works". --Francis Schonken (talk) 05:47, 9 May 2021 (UTC)
    • Uh... what? You're addressing things that have nothing to do with what I just said. If you had chosen #4, it would have preserved the current title for the Bach article and changed the others to "Reception Jane Austen/J. R. R. Tolkien's writings", but you seem too obsessed with whatever the rant above is. Aza24 (talk) 07:54, 9 May 2021 (UTC)
      • No, my reply was perfectly adequate. I don't want a rule in the sense you are proposing. Not any of the "options". There is no series in the sense of WP:CONSISTENT. No such rule should hamper, for instance, a future RM proposing to rename Reception of Johann Sebastian Bach's music to Bach reception, and let that procedure turn out whatever is the consensus at that time. The WP:RULECRUFT you're proposing is no good, not under any circumstance. So, please stop trying to undermine my exact !vote, which is exactly what I've been describing and nothing else: I oppose all options of the current RM, and more fundamentally oppose the idea that a one-mold-fits-all should be imposed on these three, and any future, reception-related article titles. --Francis Schonken (talk) 08:21, 9 May 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose for the reasons stated by Francis. It's not clear how enforcing a consistent format for the titles of these articles would improve the reader experience, and there is enough variation between these articles that a one-size approach is potentially harmful. For example, the Austen article is emphasizing a diachronic analysis, so the inclusion of the term "history" in the title is much more apt than it would be for the Tolkien article, as it's currently structured. I rarely like to invoke the WP:AINTBROKE philosophy, but it really does apply to a lot of these attempts to apply WP:CONSISTENT across disparate articles just because. Colin M (talk) 18:44, 8 May 2021 (UTC)

  And what exactly is unique about each article to warrant "music" in one but not "writings" in the others? Aza24 (talk) 07:54, 9 May 2021 (UTC)

• Support #3 per nominator and User:Aza24. As mentioned by Aza24 above, the title format of options 1 and 2 (and the current format of the Tolkien and Austen pages) could be perceived to be "reception of [name] as a person (and their character)". Paintspot Infez (talk)
• Oppose. These articles have little in common and no need to be internally consistent, and you have to really want to in order to see the titles as ambiguous (exactly nobody will be confused by this). --Xover (talk) 08:10, 9 May 2021 (UTC)
• Support #1 for authors. Not sure about whether music and literature ought to be treated the same, so I'm neutral on that for now. But 1 is the standard way to treat authors. See "Brill's Companion to the Reception of". Srnec (talk) 16:34, 9 May 2021 (UTC)
• I strongly favor no. 3 on this list as maximally consistent and less ambiguous (as I often say, "any attempt at disambiguation that introduces a new ambiguity is, by definition, a failure"). "Reception of [name]" is too easily misunderstood by readers as reception of the person in society in general, e.g. reception of their socio-political positions, etc., etc. Consider the literary-critcism and fandom reception of J. K. Rowling's novels, versus public reception of her stance on trans issues in the UK. Big difference, even in the mind of the same person (e.g., a lover of the Harry Potter stories who is appalled at Rowling's TERFism). Similarly, Ralph Nader has a very different reception for his published works on consumer safety and similar topics, versus his abortive but repeated efforts as a would-be politician. However, I don't think we need to use "Reception of J. R. R. Tolkien's writings", "Reception of Johann Sebastian Bach's music", etc. (or the "Reception of the [whatever] of [name]" versions). It's over-precision when "works" will do. I would propose "works" here because "work" is again ambiguous (Nader's political campaigns qualify as "work" in the mass-noun sense, and so on). And MoS, WP categories, etc. use the count noun "works" when refering to published works, not "work" (except in specifically singular phrases like "For a work published in a language other than English ...").  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:21, 10 May 2021 (UTC)
  • Did you perhaps think that Bach didn't write? Or that scholars didn't describe the reception of the composer's writings? Or that the reception of his writings would normally be included when scholars write about the reception of his music? Or that the scholarly shorthand of "Reception of Johann Sebastian Bach's music" is not "Bach reception"? SMcCandlish seems to be extrapolating things they apparently know something about to fields they quite clearly know much less about. Johann Sebastian Bach (and the scholarship around him) is a quite different article from J. K. Rowling and her commentators in 21st-century social media, I suppose. So no, based on three existing articles, there is no "series" with a name pattern yet. "Reception of Johann Sebastian Bach's works" would be neither precise for the current content of "Reception of Johann Sebastian Bach's music", nor the (scholarly) common name for that topic, so should be rejected out of hand, and not be determined by people who have not much of a clue what they're talking about. --Francis Schonken (talk) 04:53, 10 May 2021 (UTC)
    • "Did you perhaps think that Bach didn't write?" You're basically making my argument for me. If we think it encyclodedic to cover critical/public reception of the non-musical works of Bach, we should do so in the same article, not fork out another one, unless the result would run into WP:SIZE limits. Ergo "Reception of the works of Johann Sebastian Bach" or "Reception of Johann Sebastian Bach's works" will be an entirely adequate title, unless/until such a split became required and a new level of precision were needed. But "Reception of Bach" implies more of a social/society interaction and integration topic about the man himself, not his works, and this is not what we would have an article about. Similarly, we have a single article on reception of the works of Tolkien, not one for reception of his fantasy fiction and a different one for reception of his academic works like his prose translation of Beowulf.

      Francis, I know you hate my guts (judging from your behavior toward me since ca. 2006), for whatever unexplained reason(s), but you really need to think more critically before you leap into knee-jerk opposition to everything I write simply because it came from me – and in this case, seemingly with the only actual purpose of inserting an insinuation that I'm too stupid to know Bach ever wrote anything but sheet music and too stupid to have considered various other things, and then engage in a bunch of fantastical projection about varous ad hominem things including what I know and don't know and what my movitations are. Your civility history is long-term problematic, and you do not appear to be learning from your blocks. Oh, never mind. I went to leave you a civility warning template, but see that you're already blocked yet again, indefinitely, since 06:00, 10 May 2021 (UTC), literally while I was writing this. D'oh.
       — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:45, 10 May 2021 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Sorry Elli, the only "WP:TRAINWRECK" here seems to be your close. This should have been re-listed; one of the opposes was from a consistently absuive user who has now been permanently banned; and there were only two others, one of which didn't address my query on "what exactly is unique about each article to warrant "music" in one but not "writings" in the others" and the other which was sparsely explained. Otherwise there were three users support #3 and one #1—thus four users expressing a need for a move. Sounds like a relist and not a close so I don't know that you should be closing moves if you couldn't see that. Aza24 (talk) 05:54, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

@Aza24: feel free to take to move review if you really find my close so problematic (but it's been long enough that you might be better off just starting a new RM). Relisting isn't a secret sauce to generate more consensus, and I doubt it would've actually improved this discussion. Elli (talk | contribs) 06:04, 17 June 2021 (UTC)