Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 November 2022
Chapter 4 interprets Austen’s beloved comedy of marriage in dialogue with Cavell’s philosophy of comic remarriage. In its first half I consider the charismatic art of Pride and Prejudice as a form of the conversational “sequel,” as Pride and Prejudice the cultural phenomenon comprises an unbounded event of uncontainable circulation and exchange. The chapter’s second half gives visibility to Cavell’s omission of the genealogy of the European concept of perfectibility from his Emersonian inflection of moral perfectionism. Cavell has never explicitly laid out or paid homage to the trajectory, tensions, and implications of perfectibility as a concept found in European philosophy and literature of the Enlightenment. The omission impacts a Cavellian reading of Pride and Prejudice by laying new stress on how Austen uses comic style to articulate her own fictional stance against the disembodiment and rhetorical rigidity of much thinking on “perfectibility” – especially Godwin’s. At the center of Jane Austen and Other Minds, the chapter enacts a hinge-movement regarding philosophy’s historical and material conditions and gender as topics of emergent interest in late Cavell.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.