Reading The Romantic Ridiculous aims to take Romantic Studies from the sublime to the ridiculous. Building on recent work that decentres the myth of the solitary genius, this duograph theorises the ridiculous as an alternative affect to the sublime, privileging collective laughter above solitude and selfishness and reflecting on these ideals through the practice of joint authorship. Tracing the history of the ridiculous through Romantic and post-Romantic debates about sublimity, from the rediscovery of Longinus and the aesthetic theories of Burke and Kant to contemporary queer and postcolonial theory interested in silliness, lowness, and vulnerability, Reading the Romantic Ridiculous explores Romanticism's surprising commitments to ridiculousness in canonical material by writers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Jane Austen, and Charles Lamb as well as lesser-known material from joke books to children's literature. In theory and practice, this duograph also considers the legacies of Romanticism – and ridiculousness – today, analysing their influence on independent film, sitcoms, and young adult fiction, as well as their place in higher education now.
'In this brilliant study of Jane Austen’s fiction, Rita J. Dashwood deftly illuminates the complexity of women’s relationships to nineteenth-century property, by considering not only houses and estates, but law, inheritance, management, interior spaces, and feelings. Women and Property Ownership in Jane Austen, which breaks important new ground in Austen studies, will appeal to newcomers and seasoned readers alike.'
– Professor Devoney Looser, Professor of English, Arizona State University
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'Combining meticulous close reading with a thorough knowledge of contemporary debates, Rita Dashwood expertly demonstrates how Austen’s fictional characters forged affective connections with the properties they inherited, managed, lived in and imagined, often working around and against the legal system and its constraints. In so doing she both expands our understanding of ‘ownership’ in the period and provides compelling evidence for Austen as, in her brother’s words, "the novelist of home."'
– Professor Joe Bray, Professor of Language and Literature, The University of Sheffield
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Women and Property Ownership in Jane Austen investigates the centrality of real property – the house and the estate – in Austen’s fictional works, and how it allows her to depict her characters establishing complex relationships to the spaces they inhabit. By offering an original reconceptualisation of “ownership” which includes legal as well as affectionate relationships towards property, this book particularly considers how the women in Austen’s novels establish feelings of ownership towards houses they are not legally entitled to own. As this book demonstrates, through her work, Austen offers more than just a criticism of the current property laws and the ways in which they affect women: she puts forward alternative ways for women to establish a sense of purpose for themselves and express their identities through the spaces they create and occupy, unreservedly legitimising female ownership.​​