new posts in all blogs
Viewing: Blog Posts Tagged with: Sense and Sensibility, Most Recent at Top [Help]
Results 1 - 8 of 8
How to use this Page
You are viewing the most recent posts tagged with the words: Sense and Sensibility in the JacketFlap blog reader. What is a tag? Think of a tag as a keyword or category label. Tags can both help you find posts on JacketFlap.com as well as provide an easy way for you to "remember" and classify posts for later recall. Try adding a tag yourself by clicking "Add a tag" below a post's header. Scroll down through the list of Recent Posts in the left column and click on a post title that sounds interesting. You can view all posts from a specific blog by clicking the Blog name in the right column, or you can click a 'More Posts from this Blog' link in any individual post.
By: Andy Yates,
on 10/22/2015
Blog:
Illustration Friday Blog
(
Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:
design,
illustration,
comics,
Marvel,
illustration friday,
disney,
comic,
alice in wonderland,
artists,
black and white,
Iron Man,
Sense and Sensibility,
Paul Levitz,
Disney comics,
weekly topics,
Chris Claremont,
small press comics,
Sonny Liew,
DC Vertigo,
indy comics,
slave labor graphics,
comics illustrator of the week,
comics tavern,
comics tavern cover of the week,
Doctor Fate,
Malinky Robot,
Mark Hempel,
My Faith in Frankie,
Singapore Comics,
The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye,
Wonderland Comic,
Xeric Award,
Add a tag
The story goes that legendary Uncanny X-Men scribe Chris Claremont discovered Malaysian-born artist Sonny Liew at a comics convention and got him his first big break into comics, landing Liew a gig illustrating Iron Man for Marvel. It was a small gig, just one illustration, but it set the stage for Liew’s bright future in comics! In 2004, Sonny Liew won the Xeric Award(an award for excellence in self-published comics) in 2004 for Malinky Robot. Later, he would go on to illustrate such titles as Slave Labor & Disney’s Wonderland series, Marvel’s Sense and Sensibility adaptation, and collaborate with artist/inker Mark Hempel on DC/Vertigo’s My Faith in Frankie.
Before studying illustration at Rhode Island School of Design, Liew attended college in Singapore(where he currently resides) and in the UK. His work has been featured in the critically acclaimed anthology Flight and he’s served as editor of the Southeast Asian comics anthology Liquid City.
Liew has been a celebrated artist at home, winning Singapore’s Young Artist Award in 2010, but recently he’s found himself in a bit of controversy over his latest book, The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye. The grant that supported the making of that book was withdrawn by the National Arts Council for containing sensitive topics. You can hear more about this story from the man himself at this book sharing session.
Right now is a great time to become a Sonny Liew fan, because he’s making some of the best comics art of his career on the newly relaunched Doctor Fate series with famed DC writer/editor/former-president Paul Levitz! I see that more people are catching onto this series, now that it’s up to issue 5, so hopefully that will continue to happen and we’ll get a nice, long Doctor Fate run out of Liew!
If you’d like to see more art and learn more about Sonny Liew, check out his blog here.
For more comics related art, you can follow me on my website comicstavern.com – Andy Yates
By: Kirsty,
on 7/17/2014
Blog:
OUPblog
(
Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:
Multimedia,
jane austen,
persuasion,
pride and prejudice,
northanger abbey,
austen,
OWC,
jane,
Oxford World's Classics,
emma,
Humanities,
sense and sensibility,
mansfield park,
*Featured,
John Sutherland,
Quizzes & Polls,
deirdre la faye,
literary quiz,
so you think you know jane austen,
quizbook,
deirdre,
faye,
twitter and facebook,
motivates,
quiz,
Literature,
Add a tag
How much do you know about the works of one of our best-loved classic authors? What really motivates the characters, and what is going on beneath the surface of the story? Using So You Think You Know Jane Austen? A Literary Quizbook by John Sutherland and Deirdre La Faye, we’ve selected twelve questions covering all six of Austen’s major novels for you to pit your wits against. Whether you are an expert or an enthusiast, we hope you’ll learn a little extra than you already knew.
Your Score:
Your Ranking:
For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only literature articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS
Image credit: Jane Austen. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
The post So you think you know Jane Austen? appeared first on OUPblog.
Well, hello Edward Ferrars!
In Chapter 3, we meet Fanny Dashwood's brother, Edward. As the eldest son, he is the heir presumptive. We already know that his mother is stingy, based on what Fanny said in chapter 2, and that she controls the purse strings - something that is repeated in this chapter, just so we don't forget about it. This means that Edward is likely to be well-off eventually, but also that he is likely to have to marry well, since his mother will have to approve the match. We're told that his mother and his sister both want him to make a splash, somehow earning a name for himself in politics or as one of the great men of the times. His sister's desire for him to have a barouche is a desire for him to engage in ostentatious display, since a barouche at the time was the equivalent of a luxury convertible now.
Edward is a nice, quiet guy who hits it off with Elinor, and they form an obvious emotional attachment. Mrs. Dashwood is only too happy to think of Elinor being married and settled, and it suits her romantic nature just fine to jump to conclusions as soon as Elinor says a favorable word about him. Marianne, who is still more romantic than her mother, is less certain that she approves Edward as a suitor. He's not sufficiently heroic for her - she wants a Mr. Darcy, and not Mr. Darcy the prig at the beginning of P&P, and probably not even Mr. Darcy at the end of P&P, but the Mr. Darcy everyone concocts for themselves, who is tall, dark, handsome, rich, well-educated, well-dressed, and refined, and also caring and exceedingly "into" his lady love. It is not enough that Edward approves Elinor's painting - Marianne believes he ought to know all about painting, and finds him deficient for saying nice things just because it was Elinor's artwork. Marianne complains about his flat reading of the poems of William Cowper (pronounced Cooper, incidentally), who is best known for his poem The Task and for " ". Marianne wants a far more dramatic rendition of the poem, you see.
You'll note that we don't learn what Elinor thinks of Edward in this chapter, apart from her observation that he's not at all like his sister - a big plus!
A few points
1. House visits in Austen's time sometimes lasted for months on end. A family visit such as this at a country house put everyone there in close proximity with one another. They would have seen each other at meals, spent most evenings together, often in a group activity such as a shared musical event (one or more persons played and sang for the group), reading aloud (from such things as religious tracts, Shakespeare, novels, poetry or one of the popular travelogues of the time), games of cards, chess, or backgammon, and so forth. Well-off gentry did not often engage in most household chores - they had servants to haul wood, fix fires, milk cows, work in the fields or forests, do the cleaning, cooking and laundry, etc. So they probably saw a good deal of one another during the days as well, when occupied reading books and newspapers, writing letters, talking a walk, riding horses, receiving visitors or paying visits to others.
All of Austen's original readership knew exactly what day-to-day life was like for the landed gentry, and all of them knew exactly how days among family were spent, and how likely it was that Edward and Elinor were spending a great deal of time together, whether they got along well or not. I mention it to you now, because it's something that we as modern readers often do not give much thought to, and since Austen does not relay all that many conversations between Elinor and Edward, it would be easy to assume that perhaps there's little on which to build a relationship. My point is that there is MUCH on which to build a relationship, but it's contained between the lines here.
You'll note that this entire chapter is composed of a single conversation between John and Fanny Dashwood. John wants to keep that promise he made to his dying father and Fanny . . . does not.
Mrs. John Dashwood now installed herself mistress of Norland; and her mother and sisters-in-law were degraded to the condition of visitors. As such, however, they were treated by her with quiet civility; and by her husband with as much kindness as he could feel towards anybody beyond himself, his wife, and their child. He really pressed them, with some earnestness, to consider Norland as their home; and, as no plan appeared so eligible to Mrs. Dashwood as remaining there till she could accommodate herself with a house in the neighbourhood, his invitation was accepted.
A reminder: Mrs. John Dashwood is married to Mrs. Dashwood's step-son. And as we are about to see, she is a stingy woman, and we are all destined to despise her from here to eternity. More or less.
Behold the genius manipulation of Mrs. John (aka Fanny) Dashwood:
John Dashwood: I think I'll give £3,000 away, £1,000 a piece to each of my half-sisters.
Fanny: WTF? Just think what a horrible depravation that will be for our fat son who is only about 5 years old right now. Besides, everyone knows your sisters can't have real affection for you, since you and they have different mothers.
John: But I promised my dad!
Fanny: Yeah, but he was dying, so we should assume he had no clue what he was saying. I'm sure he didn't want you to give away half of your fortune.
[N.B. – There is no way in hell that £3,000 is anywhere close to half of his fortune.]
John: But I promised my dad! Something must be done!
Fanny: Yes, something must be done. Something that involves far less than £3,000. After all, your sisters will get married and take that money off to God knows where and Henry won't have it WOE!
John: True, Henry might turn out to be a breeder, and the money might come in handy. How's about I give them only half as much? £500 each?
Fanny: You are such a generous man! What brother would give that much to his REAL sisters, let alone these half-bloods?
John: Well, I'd rather do too much than too little. Still, they can hardly expect more.
Fanny: Who knows
what they expect? The real question is what you can
afford to do.
John: I'm inclined to give them the money – it will add to their inheritance when their mother dies, and make them each somewhat comfortable.
Fanny: Now that you mention it, they will already be SO comfortable that I'm sure they don't need your money.
John: Good point. Maybe instead I should give their mother an annuity of £100 per year while she lives.
Fanny: "[P]eople always live for ever when there is an annuity to be paid them." And then Fanny tells us a little something about her mother, Mrs. Ferrars, who we will not meet in person for many chapters, but it says a lot about where Fanny comes from:
An annuity is a very serious business; it comes over and over every year, and there is no getting rid of it. You are not aware of what you are doing. I have known a great deal of the trouble of annuities; for my mother was clogged with the payment of three to old superannuated servants by my father's will, and it is amazing how disagreeable she found it. Twice every year these annuities were to be paid; and then there was the trouble of getting it to them; and then one of them was said to have died, and afterwards it turned out to be no such thing. My mother was quite sick of it. Her income was not her own, she said, with such perpetual claims on it; and it was the more unkind in my father, because, otherwise, the money would have b
Austen's opening is not what one would call thrilling. Allow me to quickly summarize what's going on here:
The Dashwood menfolk with any ownership rights in the estate in Sussex? Yeah, they're dead. Mr. Henry Dashwood, husband to Mrs. Dashwood, has just died, leaving four children. Roll call:
1. Mr. John Dashwood, the son from a prior marriage, who is married to Mrs. Fanny (Ferrars) Dashwood, who is (as you will quickly see) a bit of a bitch. They are the parents of a fat young lad named Henry. John inherited a crapload of money from his deceased mother's estate, then gained a second huge helping of money when he married Fanny Ferrars.
2. Miss Elinor Dashwood, who, as the eldest unmarried daughter is usually referred to in company as "Miss Dashwood". She is practical and usually rational, and though she has feelings, she tries to do what society expects.
3. Miss Marianne Dashwood, who gets called "Miss Marianne Dashwood" or "Miss Marianne" because she is NOT the oldest unmarried daughter, is a highly "sensible" girl. In Austen's time, that was not a way of saying she was full of good sense; it was instead a way of saying she was highly emotional. She couldn't give a rat's ass what society expects in many cases.
4. Miss Margaret Dashwood, who is still a little girl. She is not technically "out" in society, so she doesn't really get a title so much. She only goes to dinners with relatives, although some of the gentlemen call her "Miss Margaret" to be nice. (Aww.)
Here's the thing about the estate of Norland, where Mrs. Dashwood and the girls have been living: when Mr. Henry Dashwood's uncle died, he inherited only a life interest in the estate, which will pass in full to his male children – in this case, Mr. John Dashwood, who probably only holds a life interest as well (meaning he really can't sell the estate), and fat little Henry Dashwood, who (if he lives to adulthood) will own the estate outright. The uncle left each of the girls £1,000.
Only a year after the uncle's death, Mr. Henry Dashwood dies. He leaves all his money to his wife and daughters, but it's a total of £10,000. What this means is that Mrs. Dashwood and her daughters? Yeah. They're now technically homeless, and they're going to have to live off the interest for the foreseeable future.
As Mr. Henry Dashwood lies dying, he makes his son, John, promise to do something to care for his step-mother and half-sisters. John at first intends to do something rather nice for them, but his wife quickly talks him out of it, in rather hilarious fashion, in the next chapter.
Speaking of his wife, I'm sure you all notice how Mrs. John Dashwood hastens to
pee all over her new territory Norland in order to claim the house. (Because she is younger than her stepmother-in-law, she is differentiated when in mixed company by use of her husband's name. So, "Mrs. John Dashwood" is not as important as the elder "Mrs. Dashwood", as pecking-orders go.) Speaking of Mrs. Dashwood (mère), it's important to notice that she has an overdeveloped sense of drama. Like her middle daughter, Marianne, she is a pretty emotional creature, and left to her own devices, she would have rushed out of Norland immediately – nevermind they had no place to go, really, and that such actions would lead to an irrevocable break with her stepson.
Elinor is the voice of reason, who talks her mom off that particular ledge. We're told (not shown) that Elinor has strong emotions but deliberately tempers them, something her mother hasn't managed to figure out yet, and something that Marianne deliberately and willfully refuses to learn: EMO MARIANNE IS EMO! And Margaret? Yeah, she's 13 and a little too prone to emulate Marianne. But since she's 13, we really won't see her all that much in this version of the novel.
WAIT!
Our reading of Sense and Sensbility starts this Thursday, and I have to tell you all that in some ways, I find Sense & Sensibility to be the hardest of Austen's novels to read. It's certainly the hardest to get into for a LOT of people, and here are some reasons why:
1. Sense and Sensibility was first published in 1811. Yes, that means the 200th anniversary of Austen's first publication is next year, but it also means that Austen was writing using late 18th- and early 19th-century prose. Especially for this book and her second-published novel, Pride and Prejudice, which were first written by her in the 1790s. Early 19th-century prose is different from contemporary prose. Not as different as, say, Middle English or Elizabethan English, maybe, but still . . . the phrasing is a bit different than one is used to in some cases. This is the sort of thing to which one adjusts as a book goes on, and in which one can positively delight if one really gets the hang of it (say, by reading lots of Austen and Brontë and such). Really, it's not that big a deal - it's like reading Shakespeare (or hearing it spoken): a bit foreign-sounding at first, but eventually pretty intelligible if you roll with it.
2. The book opens with a complicated legal explanation about the inheritance of estates, a topic that comes up again throughout the novel. And I mean that sincerely - both that such a thing is quite near the start of the book, and that it is complicated, even for lawyers. I was one. I know whereof I speak. That said, Austen explains it far better than any Property Law professor I've heard, and I've heard some great ones. I promise to hold your hand for this bit, which we do need to discuss because the laws of inheritance are a major inciting event in this novel, and in order to appreciate some of Austen's social activism and protofeminism, we have to know what she is saying the law is, so we can understand why she rails about it. Savvy?
3. The book also opens with a glut of similar-sounding character names, all of whom are female and all of whom are variants on Miss or Mrs. Dashwood. The funny thing is that for me, these character's names sound nothing alike now, but that is because I understand the social niceties of titles used in Austen's time - in part from having read so many Austen novels. (This is one of the reasons I generally recommend that folks read S&S last if they are reading all six of the major novels - the naming seems intuitive if you've done that, and even the legal estate stuff is discussed a bit in Pride & Prejudice, although it's a horse of a slightly different color.) But when I first read this book in the late 1990s, I really struggled to sort it out.
Have no fear, it will all be exceptionally clear as we go along. Meanwhile, at least one person asked me what edition of Sense and Sensibility I recommend. I am personally a huge fan of the Norton Edition, which was edited by Professor Claudia L. Johnson from Princeton, who really knows her stuff. She went back to the first and second editions of the novel, both of which were printed in Austen's lifetime, in order to answer questions about punctuation and the like. (Many other editions rely on the extremely popular editions done by R.W. Chapman in the early to mid-1900s; sometimes, he made stylistic changes that weren't necessary.) I like the Norton Edition because of how Johnson went about working on it, and also for the numerous excerpts of biographical information and related texts in the back of the book, some of which were quite helpful to me when I was researching the Jane Project. (I have Norton Editions of all the six major novels.)
That said, any edition of this novel will work for you. I will be referring to the Volume and Chapter numbers from the original editions, so you ought to be able to keep up fairly easily. Most book stor
I tallied up the number of chapters in my copy of Sense & Sensibility last night, and there are 50 of them. Plus I figure I have at least two days of preliminary posts and probably some stuff to say about the book after we're done reading, to say nothing of allowing time to discuss a couple of good screen adaptations. And I figure once we get too close to Christmas, folks will be so tied up with other things that perhaps we ought to wrap up in advance, which is how I decided that I'd like the whole thing done prior to Thanksgiving in the U.S., which is November 25th this year.
I figure I'll actually start the introductory posts on Monday, September 20th, with the goal of tackling Chapter One on Thursday, September 23rd. That will allow us ample time to cover roughly a chapter a day, with the possibility of a day off every now and again so folks can catch up on their reading of the book and/or the posts. (For instance, I foresee the distinct possibility of missing a few days at the very end of September/beginning of October, since I'll be travelling to South Carolina for my brother's retirement from the U.S. Air Force, along with possible college visits for S. I will try not to miss the entire 5 days involved, but we shall see.)
If you are planning on joining the S&S read-along, you have until next Wednesday to get your hands on a copy of the book so you can read Chapter One by next Thursday, September 23rd. If you don't plan to read along, I hope you will continue to stop by, since I will continue to post other content in addition to my S&S posts. And hey, some of the S&S posts may be up your alley anyway.
