Japan Office

“Becoming Jane: the women who wrote before Austen”

Oxford Academics in Japan – lecture series
Professor Ros Ballaster, Professor of 18th Century Studies; Fellow of Mansfield College

Jane Austen read the fiction of her own time; her achievement as a novelist can be seen as a response to a century of experiment in the novel. She tended, however, to acknowledge her male rather than female predecessors in fiction. Women writers before Austen had developed means of telling a story which allowed them to exercise control over their readers’ experience of emotional affect while concealing authorial presence. Austen’s much-celebrated use of irony, Professor Ballaster will argue, is already evident in early works by writers such as Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Sarah Fielding, and Sarah Scott. She will consider Austen’s earliest completed fictions, Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility, as extraordinarily mature demonstrations of the developing (female) art of ironic narration.

Professor Ros Ballaster is a Professor of Eighteenth Century Studies in the Faculty of English, and Professorial Tutorial Fellow at Mansfield College in the University of Oxford. She has published widely in the field of eighteenth-century literature and has particular research interests in women’s writing, the novel, oriental fiction, and the interaction of prose fiction and the theatre.

Wednesday 30 September 2015

19:00 – 20:00 Lecture UF Hall Sanbancho UF Building 1F, 6-3 Sanbancho Chiyoda ku, Tokyo　This lecture is free of charge and will be delivered in English
Map to lecture venue

20:15 – 21:45 Reception Tanakaya La Mer Sanbancho 1F, 6-4 Sanbancho, Chiyoda ku, Tokyo　￥3,000 (payable on the door)
Map to reception venue

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