This course will provide an in-depth exploration of the novels of Jane Austen by approaching Austen’s writing from several critical perspectives, with a special emphasis on feminist, formalist, and new historical theories. We will read her novels and the development of her literary technique within the context of the major political and social events of her day (e.g. the French Revolution, the women’s rights campaigns and the discourses of female subjectivity, the construction of the “public sphere,” and the emerging Regency culture of consumption). To illuminate her interventions in these developments, we will read contemporary examples of the discourse on women’s rights (Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman) and sensibility (poems by Helen Maria Williams and Hannah More). We will also view and discuss some of the modern cinematic adaptations of her novels.