Barbarians at the kissing gate: contemporary authors crash the Austen canon: A novel (The Dead Authors Guild) and critical commentary

Abstract

This thesis comprises a novel and critical commentary that explore the marginalization of female writers in late eighteenth-century literary criticism and biography, the erasure and/or spectral presence of queer writers and writers of colour during the same time period, and addresses efforts towards broadening the British literature canon through contemporary Austen adaptions that centre those formerly absent or marginalized voices from the original novels.

The novel The Dead Authors Guild is a speculative Austen adaption grounded in biography and feminist literary critical scholarship that animates the archival silences. Set in 2016, the young, queer American scholar protagonist flees Berkeley for an English village to research a centuries old literary mystery involving an obscure British Jamaican female writer that might save the scholar’s career but only if entanglements with an arrogant British professor and Jane Austen’s ghost, who desperately needs her help, don’t get in the way. The narrative alternates between the scholar’s point of view and that of Austen’s ghost.

In the critical commentary, the notions of biography and marginality will be explored further. Austen’s position in her reader’s minds and that of many literary critics is ‘semi-divine’. The section on the origins of the project discusses how this notion sparked the idea for the novel. How does being classed as ‘semi-divine’ impact biographies of Austen? Or inspire modern day reader pilgrims to swarm the physical spaces she inhabited, even 250 years after her birth? This prompts a discussion of her ghostly role in the novel and connects it to the erasure and/or spectral presence of queer writers and writers of colour in the British Literature canon. The decades-old movement to de-colonize the canon is put into a wider perspective that lays the foundation for the case studies section that examines contemporary Austen novel adaptions by queer writers and writers of colour.

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