A Nobler Fall of Ground: nation and narration in Pride and Prejudice Symbiosis 4.1 19-34

Essay Excerpt

"Pemberley Woods is a likely enough spot from which to explore Austen’s views on English nationalism and domestic tourism. It stands perhaps as one of her most univocal representations of Englishness and gentrified taste. Yet it may seem a strange landing from which to launch a survey of the author’s views on America. Austen’s descriptions of the landscape on which Pemberley House is situated, and her narrative style in the novel in which it makes its appearance, however, take on new meaning when viewed in the light of the North American topographical narrative, a genre which during the last decades of the eighteenth century put forward enticing descriptions of a wilderness frontier and brave new world that lured or threatened to lure Southey and Coleridge, among thousands of others, to American shores. Austen’s Burkean response to the rhetoric of these narratives, along with the ways that response highlights the relation between novel, empire, and nation, is the subject of this essay."​