Jane Austen: Myth, Reality and Global Celebrity (FutureLearn)

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.

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

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 global understanding of her work
• Evaluate the marketing of Jane Austen in her own time and now