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3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Nonbinary Jane Austen

Nonbinary Jane Austen

Paperback

Series: Forerunners: Ideas First

Literary Criticism

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1517917581
ISBN13: 9781517917586
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: Jan 7 2025
Pages: 106
Weight: 0.28
Height: 0.37 Width: 5.09 Depth: 7.05
Language: English

A bold and provocative analysis of Jane Austen as an early gender abolitionist

Chris Washington reads Jane Austen differently than we have classically understood her: rather than the doyen of the cisheteronormative marriage plot, the author theorizes how Austen envisions a nonbinary future that traverses the two-sex model of gender that we can supposedly see solidifying in the eighteenth century. Instead, Washington argues, Austen leverages the generic restraints of the novel to write a disguised autofiction in which Austen imagines herself as transgender and works to abolish gender exclusivity altogether. In doing so, she establishes a politics that ushers in a future beyond the cisheteronormative binary, one built on plurality and possibility.

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Literary Criticism