by Chris Washington
University of Minnesota Press
1/7/2025, paperback
SKU: 9781517917586
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.
Part of the University of Minnesota Press "Forerunners: Ideas First" series - short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead.
Reviews:
"This effervescent, provocative diversion shows, with wit and welcome brevity, how much further we need to go to understand Austen and do justice to her idiosyncratic genius."--JASNA News
About the Author:
Chris Washington is associate professor of English at Francis Marion University. He is editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Mary Shelley's The Last Man.