ABSTRACT

Beginning with the author’s experiences teaching Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811) at the exact moment of the COVID-19 pandemic’s outbreak, this article considers pandemic-specific changes in student reactions to Austen’s novels. Death and disease, though ever-present in Austen’s work, have been relatively unpopular as topics of discussion and – until the pandemic – have rarely been the focus of Austen studies in the undergraduate classroom. The article takes the opportunity to study how the pandemic has changed this and how it introduces new pedagogical potentials into Austen-focused classrooms, while also examining how nineteenth-century literature may contain a series of coping mechanisms in response to death and disease that are sorely needed in our pandemic and post-pandemic societies.

摘要

从作者在 COVID-19 大流行爆发的确切时刻教授简·奥斯汀的《理智与情感》（1811 年）的经历开始，本文考虑了学生对奥斯汀小说的反应在大流行中的特定变化。死亡和疾病，虽然在奥斯汀的作品中一直存在，但作为讨论的话题相对不受欢迎，而且——直到大流行——在本科课堂上很少成为奥斯汀研究的焦点。本文借此机会研究了大流行如何改变了这一点，以及它如何将新的教学潜力引入以奥斯汀为中心的课堂，同时还研究了 19 世纪的文学作品如何包含一系列应对死亡和疾病的应对机制在我们的大流行和大流行后社会中需要。