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Sarah Raff, Jane Austen's Erotic Advice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Pp. v + 201. $29.95.
Ever since the publication of Deidre Lynch's collection Janeites: Austen's Disciples and Devotees (2000), Austen criticism has turned away from interpretations of the novels, celebrations of style, and commentary on such literary techniques and forms as free indirect discourse and the courtship novel. While biographical research remains central, the critical focus has shifted to fan culture, film and digital media, Austen's influence on so-called chick-lit, and her position in the English heritage industry and the global marketing of romance. The importance of Jane Austen's Erotic Advice, a work of literary criticism cannily titled as a self-help book, derives from Sarah Raff's linking of stylistic, formal, and literary historical considerations, with a focus on Austen's letters and a reconceiving of her fandom.
Raff argues that Austen herself created the phenomenon of "Janeism," an "exorbitant devotion" for the author that goes beyond what is normal in literary reception (1), precisely because "the author's godlike care" extends to the reader's love life (121). Austen establishes the position of readerly submission to authorial will through the speech-act of the "generalization" (1). In an account that elaborates on Geoffrey Bennington's theorization of sententiousness, Raff terms generalizations "portals from the fictional world into the real world" (6). Generalizations resist fictionality, since they are subject "to the true/false distinction" ( 15). The reader's acceptance of a generalization serves to eroticize her relationship to Austen, in the manner of the "'pedagogical love'"...