About

Vivasvan Soni is an Associate Professor of English at Northwestern University, with a Ph.D. from Duke University obtained in 2000. His scholarly work focuses on eighteenth-century British literature, critical and literary theory, and the rise of the novel. He has authored the book 'Mourning Happiness: Narrative and the Politics of Modernity,' published by Cornell University Press in 2010, which received the Modern Language Association's eighteenth annual Prize for a First Book. In this work, he explores the narrative transformations in the eighteenth century that produce a modern conception of happiness, arguing that these transformations lead to the erasure of happiness as a guiding political idea. He also investigates classical ideas of happiness, such as Solon's proverb 'Call no man happy until he is dead,' and their potential to inform utopian politics. Soni's areas of interest include moral and political theory, narratology, theories of tragedy, utopian writing, and modernity. He has edited special issues and collections related to judgment, utopian imagination, and eighteenth-century thought, and has published numerous essays and articles on these topics. Soni has taught at the University of Michigan and Yale University, where he held a Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellowship, and has received fellowships from the American Philosophical Society and the Mellon/NEH at the Newberry Library.

Research topics

• Art history
• Art
• Philosophy
• Aesthetics
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• <i>Practical Form: Abstraction, Technique, and Beauty in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics</i> by Abigail Zitin

  Eighteenth-Century Fiction · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Aesthetics
  • Art
  • Art history

  Find information about UTP Journals. University of Toronto Press is Canada’s leading academic publisher and one of the largest university presses in North America, with particular strengths in the social sciences, humanities, and business. The Book Publishing Division is widely recognized in Canada for its strength in history, political science, sociology, Indigenous studies, and cultural studies. Internationally, UTP is a leading publisher of medieval, Renaissance, Italian, Iberian, Slavic, and urban studies, as well as studies in book and print culture.

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• The Utopias of Frankenstein

  Bloomsbury Academic eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • Art history
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• Energy

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2018-05-25 · 3 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• <i>The Making of Jane Austen</i>. Devoney Looser. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. Pp. viii+291.

  Modern Philology · 2018-06-14

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  Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewThe Making of Jane Austen. Devoney Looser. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. Pp. viii+291.Vivasvan SoniVivasvan SoniNorthwestern University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreHave you ever wondered how an author whose first solicitation to a publisher was returned unopened, whose first purchased manuscript languished unpublished for over a decade,1 whose published novels initially received a polite but not overwhelming reception (200), became the Jane Austen phenom we know today: feminist icon and poster child for conservatism, the Shakespeare of Prose and inspiration for Hollywood adaptations such as Clueless (1995) and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016), someone who has spawned her own cottage industry of literary criticism as well as innumerable informal book clubs, costume balls, and tea parties? This is the story that Devoney Looser proposes to tell in The Making of Jane Austen, focusing not on our current fascination with Austen but rather on moments in the earlier reception (from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century) that both echo our contemporary obsessions with “Jane” and lay the groundwork for them. If you thought the Jane Austen craze began in the 1990s, think again (2–3). Looser’s story is not a tale of meteoric ascent; nor is it a tale of the steady rise in Austen’s popularity, as tastemakers, cultural elites, and literary scholars teach us to recognize the brilliance of a writer too subtle for most to appreciate, and Austen steadily insinuates herself into all corners of our culture. Instead of the story about the inevitable growth of a classic writer’s reputation, Looser wants to call our attention to the improbable characters in the history of Austen reception who helped to establish her reputation, like the quirky illustrator whose brothers were an almost-matricide and a bigamist, or the author of perhaps the earliest monograph on Austen, who was thought to have returned from the dead to communicate through a medium. Looser wants to show us that every generation has had to fight over who “Jane Austen” is, and what “Jane Austen” means. Jane Austen was not always there from the beginning waiting to be discovered by us; she was created through innumerable acts of rewriting and reinterpretation (in illustrations, dramatic and screen adaptations, political deployments, scholarly analyses, textbook excerpts) during the many culture wars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The title of Looser’s book, then, with its allusion to the popular “making of …” filmic genre, is not entirely tongue-in-cheek; the protagonists of her story are usually not scholars, literati, or other elites working to turn Austen into highbrow literature, but rather ordinary people working in the trenches of cultural production, adapting and recasting Austen as they see fit for their purposes: hack illustrators, screenwriters, schoolteachers, suffragists (10–11). There is something exhilarating and empowering in this narrative, which lets us see that contemporary popular appropriations of Austen are not a symptom of the newly fallen state of our culture but a perennial feature of “the making of Jane Austen” (73); according to Looser, we make our own Jane Austens, but not just as we please. At the same time, however, there is something disheartening in such a narrative, as Austen’s writerly agency, of necessity, fades into the background. What, I found myself wondering, did Jane Austen have to do with the making of “Jane Austen”? It is a question that still perplexes me.Looser’s book follows the complicated and shifting reception of Austen in four broad areas: illustrations of Austen novels; adaptations of Austen’s novels and her life for both stage and screen; the role Austen played in political debate, particularly around questions of women’s liberation and suffrage; the place of Austen in the academy, as well as her growing role in primary and secondary education. Each of the book’s four sections tracks how aspects of our commonplace interpretations of Austen were forged by countless forgotten acts of cultural reception. In Looser’s account, the minor actors in the history of Austen reception find their voice again, just as in Austen’s novels, minor characters like the housekeeper Mrs. Reynolds or the garrulous Mrs. Bates can exert a surprising torsion on the plot.In the first section, “Jane Austen, Illustrated,” Looser explores the ways in which illustrators of Austen’s novels shaped the perception of her. Austen’s first illustrator, Ferdinand Pickering, sought to update her for a Victorian audience, ensuring that Austen would later be grouped with Victorian novelists rather than her Romantic-era peers (28–29). But his images dominated the Austen landscape for at least sixty years, “in effect freezing Austen’s characters in the fashions of the 1830s” (29). Pickering’s illustrations “promoted a sense that [Austen’s] novels were best understood as familial, female focused, and sensational” (20), which “may well have led early audiences to downplay or misjudge the importance of humor, irony, sociality, or social criticism in her fiction” (28). After the dominance of Bentley’s edition, which featured Pickering’s illustrations, there was between the 1890s and 1910s an explosion of competing, lavish editions of Austen, often marketed as Christmas gifts or even wedding presents. Illustrations in these editions tended to “promot[e] an Austen more widely perceptible as fashionable rather than old fashioned, comic rather than serious, social rather than intimate, and gently satirical rather than gently sensational” (60). Bolder interpretations of Austen begin to emerge, with Chris Hammond, Austen’s “first identifiably female illustrator” (62), highlighting “sexual desire and tension” in the text, while Punch artist Wallis Mills emphasizes Austen’s irony, “female wit and strength of body and mind” (69).As Austen makes her way to the stage by the end of the nineteenth century, more unconventional interpretations proliferate. Although we tend to attribute some of the current surge in Austen’s popularity to Hollywood adaptations, section 2 of Looser’s book traces how stage adaptations of Austen played this role even before the advent of film, emphasizing aspects of Austen’s texts and life that had gone unremarked. Unlike Charles Dickens, Walter Scott, and Charlotte Bronte, Austen was a latecomer to the nineteenth-century stage, not really performed until 1895 (77). The first dramatic adaptations, Rosina Filippi’s Duologues (1895), were short excerpts from the novels, designed to be performed at home. Filippi’s Duologues played down romance in order to foreground the strong, assertive women in Austen’s novels (90–91). Austen was being enlisted to empower young women long before current feminist recuperations. Similarly, Looser shows that sexy Darcys predate the big-screen portrayal by Laurence Olivier, going back at least to Helen Jerome’s 1935 Broadway adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (112). We also learn of the many bizarre unrealized screenplays that preceded Hollywood’s 1940 adaptation, including a racy conversation between Darcy and Elizabeth about breeding dogs (131), and a script which was to have included “elements of the melodrama and the Western” (133). But perhaps most striking in this section is Looser’s account of Eleanor Holmes Hinkley’s Dear Jane (1932), a palpably queer retelling of Austen’s life for the stage.Section 3, “Jane Austen, Politicized,” illustrates that the familiar difficulty of reading Austen politically can be traced to the early twentieth century. A pair of chapters describes how Austen was at once the darling of elite male clubs and an icon in the nascent suffragist movement. A final section tracks Austen’s place in education, focusing less on literary criticism in the academy (though a whole chapter is devoted to Pellew’s academic essay) than on abridgments, textbooks, and compendia that brought Austen into schools at the moment when women were gaining increased access to formal education. Paradoxically, these editions “presented [Austen] at her most conservative” (198), but they were also crucial for establishing Austen’s reputation as the canonical English novelist she has become.Today, we are confronted with a multitude of Austens, both in literary criticism and in popular culture. There is a liberal Austen, a radical Austen, a conservative Austen, a feminist Austen, a queer Austen, a gothic Austen, a romantic Austen, a high school rom-com Austen. Whether we celebrate or lament this fact, it is all too easy to imagine that these seemingly contemporary Austens were concocted just yesterday. Nothing could be further from the truth. Looser’s book gives us a much-needed historical perspective, showing that the most cutting-edge and the most retrograde interpretations of Austen have a deeper history than we have imagined. But what is surprisingly missing from Looser’s story is the text of Austen’s novels themselves, the very thing which in the end makes Jane Austen Jane Austen. “Austen,” on this telling, has become the name for an infinitely malleable set of ideological projections, seized upon by particular individuals or entire historical movements for their own purposes, unmoored from the texts which are their supposed pretext: “She [‘Jane Austen’] has adapted, or, rather, many of us have adapted her, finding in her what best suits us. Her reputation has shifted with the times and with the needs and desires of her multiple audiences” (217). But surely we must still ask: What in Austen’s text authorizes the reading of her as liberal, conservative, feminist, romantic and so forth? Are all these interpretations equally available in the text, simply waiting for the right critic to come along and make a particular strand of latent meaning manifest to us? Or are some readings of Austen better than others, more plausible, more consistent with the vision articulated in the novels? Because The Making of Jane Austen celebrates the variety of interpretations, particularly popular interpretations, that have peppered the history of Austen reception, these questions must recede from view. The judgment required by acts of interpretation must be held in abeyance, so the history of interpretations can be put on display. But if we are to take our place in that history, we can only do so through our own interpretations of Austen’s novels. To find out what Austen means for us, we will have to judge for ourselves what Austen means. That question cannot be answered by a history of competing interpretations. In one sense, the Making of Jane Austen stages the very dilemma that confronts us in every Austen novel: faced with myriad suitors (or interpretations), how will we tell the good from the bad, the better from the worse? Everything turns on it. But Austen’s novels give us more; they seek, above all, to nurture our capacity for judgment and interpretation, even as they compel us to choose. Will we have learned from them? Will we be able to distinguish the Darcys from the Wickhams, the Brandons from the Willoughbys?Notes1. Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life (New York: Vintage, 1997), 123–24, 184. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 116, Number 2November 2018 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/698965HistoryPublished online June 14, 2018 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

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• Special issue of Republics of Letters

  2017-01-01

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• Judgment and Action: Fragments toward a History

  2017-01-01 · 5 citations

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• 5. Playing at Judgment: Aporias of Liberal Freedom in Kant’s Critique of Judgment

  University of Toronto Press eBooks · 2017-12-31 · 1 citations

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• Chapter 2 Believing in Ghosts, in Part: Judgment and Indecision in Hamlet

  Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2016-11-16

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• Believing in Ghosts, in Part: Judgment and Indecision in Hamlet

  2016-01-01

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• Conclusion: Can Aesthetics Overcome Instrumental Reason? The Need for Judgment in Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees

  University of Toronto Press eBooks · 2016-12-31

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Frequent coauthors

• Thomas Pfau

  Duke University

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• Modern Language Association's eighteenth annual Prize for a…