ABSTRACT

The Introduction illuminates in new ways Austen’s engagement with her predecessors and contemporaries, including Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth, Jane West and Jane Porter, on critical questions of masculinity and its relationship to feminine agency. Although Austen’s male protagonists are social, political and economic agents, these roles are peripheral to their gender identities: how they understand themselves as men. Rather, Austen’s central male characters reflect a modern, internalised and authentic subjectivity that holds out the possibility of equal relationships with her heroines and their desire for agency and individual selfhood. Austen develops innovative textual strategies to create male characters with depth and complexity, narrative techniques for representing masculinity that revolutionised the courtship romance novel.