Shitting on Something Else - Jane Austen Has Become An Alt-Right Icon, Somehow [View all]

[TheBlackAdder]

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First, they take over Pepe, now this.

Life as a Jane Austen fan can be, occasionally, infuriating. Male classmates deride her as subliterary fluff, pop culture uses her as a shorthand for romance novels, and, for women, professing to love her turns you into a cat-possessing cliché. The latest insult, however, is the most egregious yet: Alt-right thinkers have appropriated Austen as a symbol of white nationalism, according to a Chronicle of Higher Education article by Nicole M. Wright.

Wright, an assistant professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder, noticed an Austen cameo in a Milo Yiannopoulos speech in January. “As a Victorian novelist might have put it,” she quotes him, “it is a truth universally acknowledged that an ugly woman is far more likely to be a feminist than a hot one.” Amusingly, Wright points out, Yiannopoulos, an alt-right “fellow traveler,” was incorrect about Austen’s era: the Regency-era author died some 20 years before the Victorian period commenced.

More to the point, however, is that Yiannopoulos is not being very careful with his references. The “truth universally acknowledged” in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, that “a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife,” is delivered with gentle sarcasm, not earnestness. In parodying the language of philosophical treatises, the author mocks the very simplistic assumption she’s putting forth.

More at the jump:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jane-austen-has-become-an-alt-right-icon-somehow_us_58d02757e4b00705db51b946


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