Pleasure and Profit

Interest in Jane Austen’s fiction and life has never been greater than today. Her narrative works and worlds live on 200 years after their publication not only through their own popularity, but also through numerous re-presentations in the forms of novels, movies, television series, and fan fictions that keep flourishing from her fictional worlds and characters. Austen’s novels, her settings, and particularly her characters live on in an ever-expanding (text)-universe. Hence, Austen’s six novels have developed into a huge phenomenon—a shared passion sometimes referred to as “Austenmania” (Pucci and Thompson 1). This phenomenon nourishes an Austen-related franchise that exists not only in print, but also in reality where readers and/or enthusiasts from all over the world visit places where Austen lived or places where the novels were filmed. In addition, through online discussion communities, such as “The Republic of Pemberley,” fandoms such as “Bits of Ivory,” and Twitter accounts such as “@DailyJaneAusten” with more than 11,000 followers and “@JaneAustenLIVES” with 5,000 plus followers, Austen’s fictional worlds reach an even larger population. 1 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.