(Tentative course model.  Content may change.)

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The British novelist Jane Austen is beloved by both the lay reader and the professional critic.  She is one of the most sophisticated ironists in the English language, and her novels also have the merit of being simultaneously compelling and morally educative.  This class will explore the development of Jane Austen's literary career through a focus on her life and its relation to her five classic novels, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abbey, Emma, and Persuasion.  We will try to understand why these novels have achieved the literary and popular status they enjoy now, almost two hundred years after they were written.