Reading and teaching our way out of Jane Austen novels (naval options).(Miscellany)

THE NOVELS OF JANE AUSTEN are as important for their historical value as they are for their literary merit. As Christopher Kent states in his essay, "Learning History with, and from, Jane Austen," "The French Revolution ushered in the age of historicism. Jane Austen lived and wrote at the threshold of this new era of and for history" (59). Austen's characters inhabit fringe social positions in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British society; moneyed members of the growing middle class begin to challenge knights, baronets, and other lower members of the gentry for…