Jane Austen: Myth, Reality and Global Celebrity Course - University of Southampton
FutureLearn
Key Information
Campus location
Languages
English
Study format
Distance Learning
Duration
3 weeks
Pace
Part time
Tuition fees
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Application deadline
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Introduction
Discover the fascinating story of author Jane Austen, from her own life in Hampshire to what she means to a global audience today.
Discover the life and impact of Jane Austen
Jane Austen went from being a moderately successful anonymous novelist in her own time to a global celebrity in ours. In this course you will explore how that happened, exploring Austen’s own literary influences, and her reputation over time.
You will learn about her origins in Hampshire, uncovering her formative years, and the society she lived in, asking how Austen’s location, background and reading influenced her novels. You will also consider the ways her own contemporaries read and responded to her, and her place in the modern canon of world literature today, 200 years after she died.
When would you like to start?
Most FutureLearn courses run multiple times. Every run of a course has a set start date but you can join it and work through it after it starts.
- Date to be announced
Who will you learn with?
Gillian Dow
Associate Professor in English at the University of Southampton. I research & teach Jane Austen & her contemporaries in Britain & France.
Kim Simpson
Chawton House Postdoctoral Fellow (2016-present). I also lecture in eighteenth-century literature at the University of Southampton.
Who developed the course?
University of Southampton
Southampton is a place for ambitious people keen to stretch their intellectual abilities and help change the world.
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Ideal Students
Who is the course for?
This course is for anyone with an interest in Jane Austen, including the members of Jane Austen Societies in North America, Japan, Brazil and many European countries. You will need basic knowledge of her novels.
Learners may be interested in the Master of Arts in Jane Austen offered by the University of Southampton.
Curriculum
What topics will you cover?
- The Austen myth: who is she and what does she mean to people around the world?
- An 18th-century education: Jane and women’s education and reading.
- Austen’s literary and family influences.
- Austen’s ‘dirty walks’: gardens and landscapes in Austen’s writing.
- The marketing of Jane Austen at home and abroad – how her legacy has endured and built her celebrity.
- Austen’s afterlives: adapting Jane Austen for the modern age in film, TV.
- Austen as a commodity: portraits, hair and merchandising.
Program Outcome
What will you achieve
By the end of the course, you‘ll be able to:
- Develop knowledge and understanding of the historical and literary contexts in which Jane Austen was writing.
- Investigate virtually the important locations associated with Jane Austen and their impact on her writing.
- Assess and discuss the impact of Austen’s society on the depiction of arts and reading in her novels.
- Explore some of the myths surrounding women writers of the long eighteenth century.
- Identify the challenges of adapting, translating and interpreting Jane Austen’s works and how this affects the global understanding of her work.
- Evaluate the marketing of Jane Austen in her own time and now.