Jane Austen between the covers 
(English)
2 May 2012
3:15pm
Venue: Room 201, Arts 1 (Building 206)
Host: Janine Barchas, University of Texas at Austin
With her new book in production (Matters of Fact in Jane Austen: History, Location, and Celebrity from Johns Hopkins University Press), Janine Barchas has begun a project entitled Jane Austen Between the Covers. This project tracks how book cover art records and shapes popular views of Jane Austen—from children’s writer to romance novelist, canonical author to pop-culture icon. The project extends even to today’s electronic Kindle editions, which sport outrageous “cover” images as adverts on retail sites such as Amazon.com. Barchas suggests that the extraordinary range of marketing strategies deployed as Austen book covers (enabled by changes in book pricing and production) tells us much about the shifting cultural opinion of her work.
