Blog sobre Mansfield Park

Há um blog em inglês totalmente dedicado a Mansfield Park, que é http://mansfieldpark.wordpress.com/

Lá achei esse comentário sobre o livro...

Instead it is a monster of complacency and pride who, under a cloak of cringing self-abasement,

dominates and gives meaning to the novel . What became of that Jane Austen (if she ever existed) who set out bravely to correct conventional notions of the desirable and virtuous? From being their critic (if she ever was) she became their slave. That is another way of saying that her judgement and her moral sense were corrupted. Mansfield Park is the witness of that corruption.
Kingsley Amis, What Became of Jane Austen?, p. 144

Continuando as críticas sobre Mansfield Park- na introdução da edição da Barnes and Nobles-(Introduction by Amanda Claybaugh)

"Mansfield Park is a novel about rest and restlessness, stability and change- the moving and immovable. Mansfield Park is hardly the only Austen novel to take as its subject matter a pair of opposed terms, but typically these terms stand in a dynamic relation to one another, each altering the other until a proper synthesis or balance is achieved" p. XIV

.

"Mansfield Park was written at the end of one tumultuos era, the French revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, and at the beginning of an other: the industrialization and urbanization of England. (...) Astringent and despairing at the same time, the novel insists that improvements are urgently needed, even as it registers the enormous costs that these improvements will exact. In this way, Mansfield park stands as Austen´s most profound treatment of politics, her richest response to the revolution and wars of her time" p. xvi

.

The critic Franco Moretti has most powerfully described the bildungs roman; he argues that the genre emerged in the nineteenth century because it was only then that youth became what it still remain for us, a time of possibility. Not until the advent of industrial capitalism, not until the the demise of apprenticeship and feudalk farming, could he young imagine that their lives might be different from those of their elders. The imagining of new possibilities offered a kind of compensation, Moretti suggest, for the shattering dislocations that came with such profound economic change, and the bildungsroman sought to make sense of what would otherwise be an overwhelming experience by positing an autonomous self, free to move through this new world at will- indeed, free to remake this new world in his or her own image, as the wponymous titles of bildungsromane suggest (The way of the world). That Mansfield Park is named after a place rather than a person is the first sign, then, that this novel does not fully belong to the genre.

Mansfield comes before Fanny, then, but in order to understand all that Mansfield means, we must pause to consider the tradition of country-house writing, a literary tradition that Mansfield Park both enters into and alters.

The first volume of Mansfield Park thus demonstrates that Mansfield is country house in need of improvement, seduced as it is by the glamour of mercantile London and hollowed-out by the blurring of appearance and reality. The second and third volumes of the novel explire waht improvement should entail. p.xxvi