Janeite

[4] Rudyard Kipling even published a short story entitled "The Janeites" about a group of World War I soldiers who were secretly fans of Austen's novels.

Johnson noted Janeites are "derided and marginalized by dominant cultural institutions bent on legitimizing their own objects and protocols of expertise".

[8] However, though academics dismiss the Janeites as the literary equivalent to Trekkies, there is a difference in that Austen's works are considered to be high culture unlike Star Trek.

[10] Scholars such as Johnson and Lynch study "the ludic enthusiasm of [the] amateur reading clubs, whose 'performances' include teas, costume balls, games, readings, and dramatic representations, staged with a campy anglophilia in North America, and a brisker antiquarian meticulousness in England, and whose interests range from Austenian dramatizations, to fabrics, to genealogies, and to weekend study trips".

She argues that such activities provide "a kind of time-travel to the past, because they preserve an all but vanished Englishness or set of 'traditional' values....This may demonstrate the influence of a sentimental account of Austen's novels that presents them as means by which readers might go home again – to a comfortable, soothingly normal world.

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