One of the last questions mainstream popular culture asks us to consider is, “What's so great about Mr. Darcy?” even though Pride and Prejudice is organized around just this question. For its protagonist, coming to desire Mr. Darcy is one and the same as coming to recognize oneself as a member of modern society; seeing him as the ideal man is the novel's measure of Elizabeth's gradually acquired self-knowledge. “She began now to comprehend that he was exactly the man who, in disposition and talents, would most suit her,” Austen writes. “It was an union that must have been to the advantage of both; by her ease and liveliness, his mind might have been softened, his manners improved, and from his judgment, information, and knowledge of the world, she must have received benefit of greater importance” (318). Austen may have required Elizabeth Bennet to learn to read Mr. Darcy carefully...
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Book Review|
August 01 2015
A Man's World Available to Purchase
Solinger, Jason,
Becoming the Gentleman: British Literature and the Invention of Modern Masculinity, 1660–1815
(New York
: Palgrave Macmillan
, 2012
), pp. 204, cloth
, $85.00.
Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins
Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins
eugenia zuroski jenkins is associate professor of English and cultural studies at McMaster University, author of A Taste for China: English Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism (2013), and editor of the journal Eighteenth-Century Fiction.
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Novel (2015) 48 (2): 304–307.
Citation
Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins; A Man's World. Novel 1 August 2015; 48 (2): 304–307. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-2882793
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