Elegance, Propriety and Harmony

In this video, Elegance, Propriety and Harmony: A Book Reading and Launch, a variety of writers and scholars consider the aesthetic views of Jane Austen as demonstrated in her literary works. They explain how she engages her contemporaries' philosophical perspectives and how her aesthetic views come to bear on society, religion, and relationships.

Natasha Duquette received her MA from the University of Toronto and her PhD from Queen’s University. She is now an associate professor and Chair of the English Department at Biola University where she teaches courses on eighteenth-century literature, Jane Austen, critical theory, and African literature. Her articles have appeared in Notes and Queries, Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, Christianity and Literature, and Persuasions-Online. She has also edited the collection Sublimer Aspects: Interfaces between Literature, Aesthetics, and Theology (Cambridge Scholars, 2007), as well as contributing to Jane Austen Sings the Blues (U of Alberta P, 2009) and Through a Glass Darkly: Suffering, the Sacred, and the Sublime in Literature and Theory (Wilfred Laurier U P, 2010). For the Chawton House Library series, she created a new critical edition of Helen Maria Williams’s eighteenth-century novel Julia (Pickering & Chatto, 2009). She is currently co-editing an essay collection titled Jane Austen and the Arts with Elisabeth Lenckos (University of Chicago). Her monograph Veiled Intent: Dissenting Women’s Aesthetic Approach to Biblical Hermeneutics and Social Action is forthcoming with Wipf & Stock.