Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures: Claudia L. Johnson, Murray Professor of English Literature at Princeton University
The Club and The Princeton Library in New York proudly welcome Claudia L. Johnson to the Club to discuss her 2012 release Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures, winner of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award. In her book, Professor Johnson demonstrates how Jane Austen went from writer to cult figure, one intensely — sometimes even wildly — venerated, and often for markedly different reasons. Professor Johnson explores the most important monuments and portraits of Austen, considering how these artifacts point to an author who is invisible and yet whose image is inseparable from the characters and fictional worlds she created.
Claudia L. Johnson joined the faculty at Princeton in 1994 and was Chair of the English Department from 2004-2012. She specializes in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature, with a particular emphasis on the novel. In addition to eighteenth-century survey courses, she teaches classes on gothic fiction, sentimentality and melodrama, the history of prose style, film adaptations of novels into film, on Samuel Johnson, and, of course, Jane Austen. Additionally, she has strong interests in eighteenth-century music and culture, in the idea of voice, in mysteries and narrative theory, in Yiddish story, and in the American Songbook of the 1930s and 1940s. Professor Johnson’s books include Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel; Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender and Sentimentality in the 1790s; The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft; The Blackwell Companion to Jane Austen (ed. with Clara Tuite); and Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures.She has also prepared critical editions of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey, and (with Susan Wolfson) Pride and Prejudice.
Cost: Free for members; $10 for guests
6:00 pm: Wine Reception
6:30 pm: Lecture