Paperback edition of Dr Fred Parker’s book ‘On Declaring Love: Eighteenth-Century Literature and Jane Austen’ (Routledge) comes out on 30 September 2020

Image credit: ‘On Declaring Love: Eighteenth-Century Literature and Jane Austen’, by Dr Fred Parker. Published by Routledge.

This book explores the act of declaring love in works of literature written between the middle of the eighteenth century and the death of Jane Austen – and uncovers the uncertain boundaries of the self in the force-field of courtship. This was a period highly sensitive to the propriety and artificiality of public forms, and hence peculiarly alive to problems around the idea of saying what you feel.  Through this historical lens the author considers the ways in which we may become entangled with one another through language, the limits to our operation as independent individuals, and whether in love you can only feel what you can tell.

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