Jane Austen's Emma

<p>What has Emma Woodhouse "handsome clever and rich with a comfortable home and very little to distress or vex her" to say to a discipline like philosophy? How is a novel like <em>Emma</em> inaccurately but not infrequently caricatured as a high-toned version of a pedestrian romance to supply material for philosophical insight or speculation?</p><p>Jane Austen's <em>Emma </em>is many things to many readers but it is as inaccurate as it is reductive to consider it <em>just </em>a romance. The minutia of daily living on which it concentrates permit not a rehearsal of platitudes but a closer look at human emotions and motives as well as the opportunity to hone our interpretive and empathetic skills. <em>Emma </em>flies in the face of conventional notions of femininity by presenting a heroine with hubris<em>. </em>It shows how friendships can affect one's ways of dealing with the world how shame can reconfigure self-understanding how gossip functions in sustaining a community. <em>Emma </em>rehabilitates conceptions of romance by rejecting melodrama in favor of naturalism. It explores the waywardness of the imagination and the myriad ways in which different people with different biases and agendas may evaluate the same evidence. It dwells on the limits of autonomy in that it explores the ease with which one may submit to the will of another.</p><p><em>Emma</em> is not itself a work of philosophy. Rather it leads us to <em>think </em>philosophically. In this volume a myriad group of scholars and philosophers explore the philosophical resonances of <em>Emma</em>.</p>