< TITLE>book review
Book Review
Stewart, Maaja A. Domestic Realities and
Imperial Fictions: Jane Austen's Novels in Eighteenth-Century Contexts.
Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1993. (Nicole Reynolds)
Stewart's study of Jane Austen explores Austen's novels as sites of intersection between imperial
and domestic discourses. Drawing from feminist, postcolonial, and cultural-material theories, Stewart
establishes connections between Austen's courtship narratives and eighteenth-century Britain's shift
from estate to mercantile economics in order to expose the imperialist ideology that sustains Austen's
domesticfictions. Stewart's project "is not to identify how Austen specifically reacted to [British] imperialism
in India or the West Indies, but to argue that the controversies surrounding both areas became part of the
discourses of the age that penetrated all aspects of metropolitan culture, including Austen's texts" (2). Stewart
posits that Austen's novels reveal how the rhetoric and ideology of empire inscribe the discursive formation of
female subjectivity, arguing that Austen's women "exist in the realm of speculation, expectation, and credit" (5).
The instability of this realm and of the subjects it informs offers Austen's novels the "possibilities of both
subversions and containments of the official partiarchal culture" (5). Stewart's intertexual study explores the
dialogic exchange between Austen's novels and other popular fiction of the day, including Inchbald's
A Simple Story and Burney's Evelina. Stewart studies Austen in this context in order to reveal
and criticize the disguises imperialist power assumes in its various cultural manifestations.
At the time this review was published, Nicole Reynolds was a second-year PhD candidate in the English
Department at the University of Georgia. Her interests include British Romanticism,
eighteenth-century British women writers, and postcolonial literature and theory.
Top of page
To The Austen Quarterly
Back to the ASJAS Homepage