Michael Giffin, tssf

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Jan 3
1 min

Jane Austen: The Woman on the £10 Note (now available from Amazon)

The Jane Austen phenomenon is remarkably enduring. Throughout the world, it is found within secondary schools, tertiary institutions, literary societies and popular culture. Most Austen societies are in the non-English speaking world, making her a global icon. A new book about her seems to appear each week, along with more essays, theses, blogs and vlogs. From the beginning of her publishing career, Austen was unique. Some of her early readers were prescient enough to conside

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Nov 26, 2020
1 min

Religion in the English Novel: From Jane Austen to Margaret Atwood

Romanticism marked a dramatic turning point in philosophy and aesthetics. The shift from Classicism to Romanticism to Modernism and its Posts is paralleled in the shift from Kant to Hegel to Nietzsche to Derrida. The central notions of the Enlightenment: nature, progress, rationalism, and rejection of the irrational are opposed by the central notions of the Counter-Enlightenment: relativism, vitalism, anti-rationalism, and sense of the organic. Then there is the idea of freed

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Mar 23, 2020
1 min

What does Atwood share with Austen?

On re-reading Margaret Atwood’s first published novel The Edible Woman (1969) I noticed it adapted the same structure as Jane Austen’s first published novel Sense and Sensibility (1811). How is this possible? What does it mean? In the first blush of discovery, I thought it was a classical structure but classical is a debased term with different meanings. On reflection, I now see Austen and Atwood both using the dramatic structure Aristotle describes in Poetics. How did this h

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