Jane Austen's Emma

OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Tue May 29 2018, NEWGEN i JANE AUSTEN’S EMMA Dadlez060218ATUS_MSC.indd 1 29-May-18 4:56:51 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Tue May 29 2018, NEWGEN ii Oxford Studies in Philosophy and Literature Richard Eldridge, Philosophy, Swarthmore College Editorial Board Anthony J. Cascardi, Comparative Literature, Romance, Languages, and Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley David Damrosch, Comparative Literature, Harvard Moira Gatens, Philosophy, Sydney Garry Hagberg, Philosophy, Bard Philip Kitcher, Philosophy, Columbia Joshua Landy, French and Comparative Literature, Stanford University Toril Moi, Literature, Romance Studies, Philosophy, and Theater Studies, Duke University Martha C. Nussbaum, Philosophy and Law School, University of Chicago Bernard Rhie, English, Williams College David Wellbery, Germanic Studies, Comparative Literature, and Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago Paul Woodruff, Philosophy and Classics, University of Texas at Austin Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler: Philosophical Perspectives Edited by Kristin Gjesdal Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Philosophical Perspectives Edited by Tzachi Zamir Kafka’sThe Trial: Philosophical Perspectives Edited by Espen Hammer Jane Austen’s Emma: Philosophical Perspectives Edited by E. M. Dadlez Dadlez060218ATUS_MSC.indd 2 29-May-18 4:56:51 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Tue May 29 2018, NEWGEN iii JANE AUSTEN’S EMMA Philosophical Perspectives Edited by E. M. Dadlez 1 Dadlez060218ATUS_MSC.indd 3 29-May-18 4:56:51 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Tue May 29 2018, NEWGEN iv 3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2018 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data [To come] ISBN 978–0–19–068942–1 (pbk.) ISBN 978– 0– 19– 068941– 4 (cloth) 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Paperback printed by WebCom, Inc., Canada Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America Dadlez060218ATUS_MSC.indd 4 29-May-18 4:56:51 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Tue May 29 2018, NEWGEN v Dedicated to Peter Kivy, first to contribute, to whom we give the last word. Dadlez060218ATUS_MSC.indd 5 29-May-18 4:56:52 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Tue May 29 2018, NEWGEN vi Dadlez060218ATUS_MSC.indd 6 29-May-18 4:56:52 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Tue May 29 2018, NEWGEN vii CONTENTS Series Editor’s Foreword ix Richard Eldridge Contributors xiii Introduction 1 E. M. Dadlez AQ: Please 1. Love and Friendship: Achieving Happiness in Jane verify form of name (is Austen’s Emma 25 middle initial Neera K. Badhwar and E. M. Dadlez desired?). 2. Emma’s Pensive Meditations 55 Cynthia Freeland 3. Emma and Defective Action 84 Eileen John vii Dadlez060218ATUS_MSC.indd 7 29-May-18 4:56:52 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Tue May 29 2018, NEWGEN viii CONTENTS 4. “A Danger at Present Unperceived”: Self- Understanding, Imagination, Emotion, and Social Stance in Emma 109 Richard Eldridge 5. The Many Faces of Gossip inEmma 134 Heidi Silcox and Mark Silcox 6. The Reconstrual of Imagination and Romance 158 Peter Knox- Shaw 7. Misreading Emma 184 David Davies 8. The Dilemma ofEmma : Substance, Style, and Story 216 Peter Kivy Index 243 viii Dadlez060218ATUS_MSC.indd 8 29-May-18 4:56:52 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Tue May 29 2018, NEWGEN ix SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD At least since Plato had Socrates criticize the poets and attempt to displace Homer as the authoritative articulator and transmitter of human experience and values, philosophy and literature have developed as partly competing, partly complementary enterprises. Both literary writers and philosophers have frequently studied and commented on each other’s texts and ideas, sometimes with ap- proval, sometimes with disapproval, in their efforts to become clearer about human life and about valuable commitments— moral, artistic, political, epistemic, metaphysical, and religious, as may be. Plato’s texts themselves register the complexity and importance of these interactions in being dialogues in which both deductive argumenta- tion and dramatic narration do central work in furthering a complex body of views. While these relations have been widely recognized, they have also frequently been ignored or misunderstood, as academic disciplines have gone their separate ways within their modern institutional settings. Philosophy has often turned to science or mathematics as providing models of knowledge; in doing so, it has often explicitly set itself against cultural entanglements and literary devices, rejecting, ix Dadlez060218ATUS_MSC.indd 9 29-May-18 4:56:52 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Tue May 29 2018, NEWGEN x SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD at least officially, the importance of plot, figuration, and imagery in favor of supposedly plain speech about the truth. Literary study has moved variously through formalism, structuralism, poststructur- alism, and cultural studies, among other movements, as modes of approach to a literary text. In doing so, it has understood literary texts as sample instances of images, structures, personal styles, or failures of consciousness, or it has seen the literary text as a largely fungible product, fundamentally shaped by wider pressures and patterns of consumption and expectation that affect and figure in non- literary textual production as well. It has thus set itself against the idea that major literary texts productively and originally address philosophical problems of value and commitment precisely through their form, diction, imagery, and development, even while these works also re- sist claiming conclusively to solve the problems that occupy them. These distinct academic traditions have yielded important perspectives and insights. But in the end, none of them has been kind to the idea of major literary works as achievements in thinking about values and human life, often in distinctive, open, self- revising, self- critical ways. At the same time, readers outside institutional settings, and often enough philosophers and literary scholars too, have turned to major literary texts precisely in order to engage with their pro- ductive, materially and medially specific patterns and processes of thinking. These turns to literature, however, thus far have not been systematically encouraged within disciplines, and they have generally occurred independently of each other. The aim of this series is to make manifest the multiple, complex engagements with philosophical ideas and problems that lie at the hearts of major literary texts. In doing so, its volumes aim not only to help philosophers and literary scholars of various kinds to find rich affinities and provocations to further thought and work, they also aim to bridge various gaps between academic disciplines and x Dadlez060218ATUS_MSC.indd 10 29-May-18 4:56:52 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Tue May 29 2018, NEWGEN xi SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD between those disciplines and the experiences of extra- institutional readers. Each volume focuses on a single, undisputedly major literary text. Both philosophers with training and experience in literary study and literary scholars with training and experience in philosophy are invited to engage with themes, details, images, and incidents in the focal text, through which philosophical problems are held in view, worried at, and reformulated. Decidedly not a project simply to for- mulate A’s philosophy of X as a finished product, merely illustrated in the text, and decidedly not a project to explain the literary work entirely by reference to external social configurations and forces, the effort is instead to track the work of open thinking in literary forms, as they lie both neighbor to and aslant from philosophy. As Walter Benjamin once wrote, “new centers of reflection are continu- AQ: Perhaps ally forming,” as problems of commitment and value of all kinds take add citation? on new shapes for human agents in relation to changing historical circumstances, where reflective address remains possible. By consid- ering how such centers of reflection are formed and expressed in and through literary works, as they engage with philosophical problems of agency, knowledge, commitment, and value, these volumes under- take to present both literature and philosophy as, at times, produc- tive forms of reflective, medial work in relation both to each other and to social circumstances and to show how this work is specifically undertaken and developed in distinctive and original ways in exem- plary works of literary art. Richard Eldridge Swarthmore College

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