Sarah Ailwood

Melinda Harvey

This study identifies Mansfield's involvement in six modes of literary influence. In so doing, it revisits key issues in Mansfield studies, including her relationships with other authors. It also charts new territories for exploration, expanding the terrain of Mansfield's influence to include a diverse range of writers.

Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence

This book maps the ecologies of Mansfield's influences beyond her modernist and postcolonial contexts, observing that it roams wildly over six centuries, across three continents and beyond cultural and linguistic boundaries.

This book illuminates Jane Austen’s exploration of masculinity through the courtship romance genre in the socially, politically and culturally turbulent Romantic era. Austen scrutinises, satirises, censures and ultimately rewrites dominant modes of masculinity through the courtship romance plot between her heroines and male protagonists. This book reveals that Austen pioneers and celebrates a new vision of masculinity that could complement the Romantic desire for agency, individualism and selfhood embodied in her heroines. Rewriting desirable masculinity as an internalised, psychologically complex and authentic gender identity – a model of manhood that drives the ongoing appeal and cultural power of her men in the twenty-first century – Austen explores both the challenges and the opportunities for male selfhood, romantic love and feminine agency. Jane Austen’s Men is among the first full-length works to explore Austen's male protagonists as textual constructions of masculinity. Sarah Ailwood reveals the depth of Austen's engagement with her predecessors and contemporaries, including Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane West and Jane Porter, on critical questions of masculinity and its relationship to femininity and narrative form. This book illuminates in new ways Jane Austen’s ambitions for the novel, and the political power of the courtship romance genre in the Romantic era.

Sarah Ailwood

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