Member event, for JASNA members and their guests—reservations required
Presenter: Sheila Hwang, Ph.D
Careful readers of Jane Austen’s novels have noticed that characters sometimes play various card games in the course of Austen’s novels, but they have not always realized that Austen uses these games thematically. Through Sheila, we will learn to play Speculation, a fun, fast-paced card game featured in Mansfield Park. Then we will examine the relationship between the rules of the game and the rules of love and courtship, finding examples in Austen’s novels, in her life, and in our own.
JASNA–St. Louis member Sheila Hwang is Associate Professor and Chair of English at Webster University in St. Louis and a JASNA life member. Sheila earned a B.A. in English literature from UCLA, and both an M.A. and a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She was a 2016 NEH Summer Scholar at the Newberry Library in Chicago, where she advanced her current research on the history of cartography, the rhetoric of maps, and their relationship to narrative shifts in 18th-century British travel literature. In September 2018, Sheila will be a plenary speaker for the Annual General Meeting of the Jane Austen Society of North America in Kansas City. There, she will speak about how the resort towns of Bath and Lyme Regis should be considered characters in Jane Austen’s final complete novel, Persuasion.
