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In his 1983 polemic against Romanticists' "uncritical absorption in Romanticism's own self-representations", Jerome McGann selected as illlustration a special issue of The Wordsworth Circle on Jane Austen. Rather than recognising that not all great Romantic-period liter- ature is necessarily "Romantic", the contributors had attempted to rectify Austen's marginalisation from the canon simply by identifying "Romantic" aspects of her novels.³Persuasion drew particular notice, for scholars have often commented on its lyrical and melancholy tone.⁴ Such readings, however, had the effect of qualifying without really displacing the orthodox view of Austen as a Johnsonian moralist. Marilyn Butler's political reading of Austen as an Anti-Jacobin writer also left in place this impression of Augustan rather than Romantic ideo- logical and aesthetic affiliations.⁵ However, recent scholarship shows Austen was far from an anomaly. A whole spectrum of writers of the period continued to produce topical literary parodies, comedy and satire.⁶ The question of how to relate irony such as Austen's to "Romantic" writing is therefore rendered all the more pertinent.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230206144_10

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