Final Project: The Myth of Jane Austen

For your final project, I want you to make a short Powerpoint presentation video (basically, you talking over the slides, as we did in Shakespeare) of no more than 20 minutes in length (you can do less, but that's the maximum). The point of this video will be a introduction to Jane Austen trying to correct the "myth" our culture has about Jane Austen. When people talk about her today, they tend to assume the following:

* She wrote romance novels

* She was very traditional and conservative

* She only wrote about love and marriage

* She wrote in a very ornate, outdated style

* The books need to be translated (either in language or content) for people to understand them today

Your video should confront some of all of these myths head-on, and suggest where you think they come from, and why (according to the books themselves) they are inaccurate or simply misrepresentations. QUOTE from the books to show examples that create a truer, fuller portrait of Jane Austen than we often get from movies or second-hand opinions. Help us understand, briefly, who she really was and what really makes her books such masterpieces of English literature, worth reading over 200 years later.

You DO NOT need to turn in a paper for this presentation. Just the video, which you can e-mail to me no later than Friday, July 30th. Let me know if you have any questions or concerns!

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British Literature from 1800, "The Mythmakers"

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