Introduction

This volume shows how new spaces for engaging with Jane Austen have emerged and evolved since the bicentenaries. These spaces are much more interlocking and related than is usually acknowledged by scholarly publications: the collection itself is therefore a physical space in which essays written by academics, and readers and writers from other realms, have been deliberately put together and brought into conversation. The actual collecting of the essays has been consciously undertaken to refuse the binaries of popular and “high” culture, or of “criticism” and fandom, within Austen discourse, and to show that, while we might talk about Austen in different ways, these are ultimately strands of thinking and producing that feed into and influence each other. Gillian Dow and Clare Hanson remind their largely academic audience that “in these competitive days for academic scholarship, there may be considerable advantages in working on such a popular canonical author.” The present collection goes further to try to dismantle the “popular”/ “academic” divide so that our conversations can merge and forge a more open community. Many events that occurred throughout the bicentenaries have inspired the curation of the essays you find here. Moreover, the essays themselves consider different spaces in which Austen is read and how these impact our engagement with the novels, from classroom to conference, from blog to review.