Abstract
Mansfield Park is Jane Austen’s great ‘Condition of England’ novel, and as such stands as one of a great trilogy of novels of 1814 — the others are Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley and Frances Burney’s The Wanderer — analysing the State of the Nation in what was to be the last full year of the Napoleonic Wars. This much we can say with certainty, though not much else, as what precisely it is that the novel has to say about the state of the nation is, to say the least, unclear. This is because Mansfield Park is an extraordinarily complex aesthetic and ideological text which does not and will not fit preconceived ideas, particularly if readers demand a didactic ideological stance which is consistent, univocal or internally coherent.
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Notes
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© 2004 Darryl Jones
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Jones, D. (2004). Mansfield Park. In: Jane Austen. Critical Issues. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-80244-5_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-80244-5_5
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