Jane Austen Society of North America
2005 Annual General Meeting
October 7-9, 2005
Hyatt Regency Hotel,
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Plenary
Speakers
The Grandeur of the Meeting was beyond my
hopes.
—Jane to Cassandra, January 24, 1809
Eminent speakers will develop the conference theme in plenary sessions.
Members who arrive early will be treated to a pre-AGM talk on Thursday
evening by British scholar Irene Collins. Deirdre Le Faye, renowned
Austen scholar, will join us through a videotaped interview. Jan Fergus
will focus on humor in Austen’s letters; Juliet McMaster, in the Joan
Philosophos Lecture, will talk about Austen and her characters as
self-conscious letter writers; and JASNA President Joan Klingel Ray
will give an illustrated lecture on the houses and estates that figure
in Austen’s correspondence. A weekend of multifaceted breakout sessions
will conclude with Sunday brunch and a lecture by JASNA’s favorite
scholarly team, Devoney Looser and George Justice.
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| Deirdre Le Faye |
An Hour with Deirdre Le Faye
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Deirdre
Le Faye will join the 2005 AGM through an interview videotaped
in England and conducted by JASNA President Joan Ray. Ms. Le Faye, one
of the world’s leading authorities on Jane Austen, discusses her
research for the third edition of Jane
Austen’s Letters. Her many books include Jane Austen: The World of her Novels,
Jane Austen’s ‘Outlandish Cousin’: The Life and Letters of Eliza de
Feuillide, The Jane Austen
Cookbook (with Maggie Black), and Jane Austen, a Family Record.
Ms. Le Faye’s current project is A
Chronology of Jane Austen and her Family, to be published by
Cambridge University Press later this year.
Chawton House Library and its founder, Sandy Lerner, sponsored and
produced this extraordinary hour with Ms. Le Faye. The interview was
recorded at Chawton House Library, the Elizabethan manor house owned by
Austen’s wealthy brother Edward, now home to The Centre for the Study
of Early English Women’s Writing: 1600-1830. |
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| Jan Fergus |
“The Whinnying of Harpies”? Humor in Jane Austen’s Letters
Published in Persuasions 27 (2005).
“‘The Whinnying of Harpies’: Humor in Jane Austen’s Letters.” Persuasions 27 (2005): 130-141.
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Austen
scholar Jan Fergus will deliver the Carol Medine Moss Keynote
Lecture, focusing on humor in Jane Austen’s letters. A graduate of
Stanford and the City University of New York, Dr. Fergus is Professor
of English at Lehigh University. Her many publications include Jane Austen: A Literary Life and Jane Austen and the Didactic Novel:
Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice.
Dr. Fergus has made a name for herself within JASNA for her amusing
lectures and articles on whining: “’My sore throats, you know, are
always worse than anybody’s’: Mary Musgrove and Jane Austen’s Art of
Whining” (Persuasions 15), and
“Male Whiners in Jane Austen’s Novels”
(Persuasions 18). In addition
to articles in numerous scholarly
journals and collections, she contributed “The Professional Writer” to The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen
and edited and wrote the introduction to Austen’s Lesley Castle and A History of England for Juvenilia
Press. |
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| Juliet McMaster |
Your Sincere Freind, the Author
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Juliet
McMaster, Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta, will
give the Joan Philosophos Lecture. It was Joan who chose the conference
theme and Dr. McMaster who suggested to her the title. Dr. McMaster’s
speech,
“Your Sincere Freind, The Author,”
will
examine Austen and her characters as self-conscious letter writers. Dr.
McMaster is well known to JASNA members as founder of Juvenilia Press,
AGM speaker, contributor to and former editor of Persuasions, and coordinator of
JASNA conferences, including Lake Louise and Jasper. She is the author
of Jane Austen the Novelist: Essays
Past and Present, and she co-edited The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf, The
Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen and Jane Austen’s Business: Her World and her
Profession. Her writing appears in many journals and
collections, including, The Talk in
Jane Austen and The Jane
Austen Companion. |
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| Joan Klingel Ray |
The Woman who Came to Dinner: Jane Austen
and Country Houses in Visits and Letters
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The
2005 AGM North American Scholar will be Joan Klingel Ray, President
of JASNA. The title of her lecture is “The Woman Who Came to Dinner:
Jane Austen and Country Houses in Visits and Letters.” She will provide
an illustrated tour of houses that figure in Austen’s correspondence,
bringing to life Goodnestone, Ibthrope, Godmersham Park, Ashe and
Deane, to name a few. Dr. Ray teaches at the University of Colorado at
Colorado Springs, where she is University President's Teaching Scholar,
a lifetime title awarded to outstanding faculty. She is editing
the Dictionary of Literary Biography
volume on Jane Austen. Her papers on Austen include
"In Defense of Lady Russell: The Godmother Knew Best”
(Persuasions 15) and
“Jane Austen’s Case Study in Child Abuse,” about Mansfield Park
(Persuasions 13).
Dr. Ray has published in numerous scholarly journals, including Studies in Philology, The George
Herbert Journal, The
Explicator, Dickens Quarterly,
and Studies in Short Fiction.
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| Devoney Looser and George Justice |
Burn this Letter: Personal Correspondence
and the Secrets of the Soul
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Devoney
Looser and George Justice, JASNA’s favorite wife-husband
scholarly team, will deliver the concluding AGM lecture, entitled “Burn
this Letter: Personal Correspondence and the Secrets of the Soul.” They
are Associate Professors at the University of Missouri-Columbia.
Dr. Looser is the author of British
Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670-1820, the editor
of Jane Austen and Discourses of
Feminism, and the co-editor of Generations:
Feminist Academics in Dialogue. She is co-editor of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies
and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the
Humanities, the Huntington Library, and King's College-London's Special
Collections, among others. Dr. Looser is a former member of the
JASNA board of directors and currently serves on the executive
committee of the Midwest Modern Language Association, as well as the
Late Eighteenth-Century Division of the Modern Language
Association. Her work-in-progress is a book on British women
writers and old age, 1750-1850. With Dr. Justice, she is editing
a volume of the correspondence of Samuel Richardson.
Dr. Justice is the author of The
Manufacturers of Literature: Writing and the Literary Marketplace in
Eighteenth-Century England and the co-editor of Women’s Writing and the Circulation of
Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550-1800. He is
working on a project on educational institutions, the book trade, and
the English novel in the eighteenth century, as well as a chapter on
Frances Burney and the literary marketplace for the Cambridge Companion to Burney. He
is book review editor for JASNA News, and he and his wife are the JASNA
Midwest Traveling Lecturers. Dr. Justice counts as his proudest
teaching achievement a course on Jane Austen: Life and Works, for which
his students read biographies, letters, and novels and created their
own Austen web logs. |
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| Irene Collins |
How to Write a Begging Letter: Hints
and Examples from Jane Austen's Letters and Novels
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Members who arrive in
Milwaukee early will enjoy a Thursday evening
lecture by British scholar Irene Collins. During the 2003 AGM, Ms.
Collins delighted JASNA with her plenary speech and moving recitations
from Austen’s work at the memorial service in Winchester
Cathedral. Ms.
Collins taught for many years at Liverpool University and is an
international authority on the history of Napoleon. Her publications
include Jane Austen and the Clergy
and Jane Austen, the Parson’s
Daughter. Joan Philosophos once remarked that she would listen
to Ms. Collins read from the London phone book, though for the 2005
meeting Ms. Collins promises much more. |
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