Jones, Darryl 1967–

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Jones, Darryl 1967–

PERSONAL: Born 1967. Education: York University, B.A., D.Phil.

ADDRESSES: Office—Department of English, Trinity College, University of Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland. E-mail—drjones@tcd.ie.

CAREER: Writer and educator. Trinity College, Dublin, Dublin, Ireland, lecturer in English.

WRITINGS:

Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film, Arnold (London, England), 2002.

Jane Austen, Palgrave Macmillan (New York, NY), 2004.

(Editor, with Anne Dolan and Patrick Geoghegan) Robert Emmet: Bicentenary Essays, University College Dublin Press (Dublin, Ireland), 2005.

Also author, with Stephen Matterson, of Studying Poetry, Oxford University Press (New York, NY). Contributor of articles to periodicals, including Literature and History, Irish Review, and Women's Writing. Articles included in anthologies, including The Handbook of Gothic Literature, edited by Marie Mulvey Roberts, Macmillan (Basingstoke, England), 1998; An Uncomfortable Authority: Maria Edgeworth and Her Contexts, edited by Chris Fauske and Heidi N. Kaufman, Delaware University Press (Newark, DE), 2004; The World Is Full of Terrible People: Essays on Shirley Jackson, edited by Bernice Murphy, McFarland (Jefferson, NC), 2005; and Contemporary Millennialism, Baylor University Press (Waco, TX), 2005.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Research on "mass death and catastrophe fiction, and on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre."

SIDELIGHTS: Darryl Jones is the author of Jane Austen, a study not of the titular British novelist but instead of the history of criticism of her and her works. As Jones shows, the question of Austen's politics has always been a controversial one. Despite the claims of the various sides in the debate, her novels actually give little firm evidence of how she felt about the issues of her day, which included slavery, the Enlightment, the French Revolution, and early feminism. Jones explains that while some Austen critics have even chosen to criticize Austen's very decision not to write explicitly about these topics, claiming that by choosing to ignore them she was tacitly condoning the unjust status quo, other critics have argued that Austen's work clearly espouses early feminist tenets. Jones also discusses the many sexual innuendos that critics have found in Austen's works. Overall, Jane Austen is "a lively round-up of recent criticism," concluded Independent reviewer Loraine Fletcher.