Stefanie Markovits

Jane Austen and the Happy Fall

Jane Austen’s novels commonly include falls, both moral and physical; indeed, Austen’s “imagination of disaster” seems curiously linked to the notion of falling. But her books positively radiate happiness, a concept both central to and contested in the philosophical debates of her day. These two categories of experience come together in the idea of the Happy Fall. By looking at how Mansfield Park (1814) and Persuasion (1817) respond to the model of the Happy Fall, we can better comprehend Austen’s understanding of the relationship between the happy and the good.

Don Juan’s Numerals

ABSTRACT Don Juan’s numerals are inescapable: its numbered cantos and stanzas allow us to track the poem’s growing chain of ottava rima, even as figures appear prominently within the verse. They often emerge in relation to love and war: the reproductive promise of sex balances the poem’s discourse of death, which climaxes in the cantos treating the sack of Ismail. Reading them in the context of the current scholarly interest in “numberiness,” this essay argues that while Don Juan’s numbers may mislead at times, they also yield positive forms of meaning. Lord Byron uses the generic affordances of narrative verse to encourage counting in order to manage the challenge that experiences of proliferation pose to a sympathy-based, Enlightenment ethics—especially in the case of collective disasters such as war. Don Juan doesn’t really teach us empathy, and nor does it teach us how to respond rationally to the sufferings of millions. What it does teach us, though, is how to get a feel for counting, for a process that can lead us from the one toward the many. This lesson is delivered formally, through the workings of the ottava rima, as it addresses issues of number, genre, and naming.