Jane Austen and the Abolitionist Turn

This essay discusses the various ways to read and teach Jane Austen and her contemporaries in a multicultural classroom at a time when questions about race, representation, and equity are considered by a new generation of English majors. Situating Mansfield Park in the context of eighteenth-century debates about women's roles in the abolitionist movement, the essay shows how the spatial and temporal distance between the Regency era and the twenty-first century provides an open space for students to think critically about a literary period they tend to read as racially neutral and to understand how literary studies intersects with contemporary political discourse.