ABSTRACT
In this essay, Michael Gamer and Katrina O'Loughlin take as a starting point the wide-spread assumption of Jane Austen’s ‘relatability’. Instead of seeing ‘relatability’ and ‘relatable’ as frustrating markers of modern disengagement or self-referentiality, they recognise it as contemporary shorthand for those complex navigations that constitute an encounter with historical and cultural difference in a two-hundred-year-old novel. Teaching Austen effectively, they contend, requires both foregrounding historical differences and recognising the power of analogical thinking to create points of entry and overlap. They propose exploiting the question of ‘relatability’ as a step toward subsequent and more fruitful questions centreing on historical and cultural difference and the imaginative experiment that is reading. Their approach is based on two premises: first, that twenty-first-century readers of Austen are far more likely than readers of previous generations to encounter Austen first through adaptations; and second, that popular adaptations and appropriations of Austen frequently carry with them implicit readings of her and her work that inform our first encounters with her fiction.
