Jane Austen and Other Minds

Jane Austen's fiction is itself philosophy, a fact to which Stanley Cavell attested when he honored his philosophical teacher, J. L. Austin, through homage to her and her work. Engaging equally in criticism and in philosophy, Jane Austen and Other Minds demonstrates the standing of Austen's fiction as a philosophical investigation, both in its own right and as a resource to ordinary language philosophy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Eric Reid Lindstrom addresses a long-standing shortcoming of Austen scholarship by locating in her fiction a linguistic phenomenology available to the novelistic everyday but not afforded her in intellectual history. He simultaneously advances recognition and understanding of J. L. Austin and Stanley Cavell, and of ordinary language philosophy, within Austen scholarship and the broader field of contemporary literary studies. This book argues compellingly for Cavell's choice of Austen as a means to pursue 'passionate exchange,' reimagining her common association with restriction and confinement.

• Combines close reading of Austen's novels with philosophical concepts in action, making dynamic the relation of literature to philosophy and offering fresh insight to students and scholars in both areas
• Gives an expansive account of the philosopher Stanley Cavell's thought and career, framed by his later writings on Jane Austen and British Romanticism, and provides an accessible introduction to his thought alongside specific applied readings that offer new analysis and insight for specialists
• Considers J. L. Austin's writings beyond arguably his best-known work, How to Do Things with Words, thus showing the profound relevance of Austin's ordinary language philosophy to contemporary literary studies