Imagining Sameness and Difference: Domestic and Colonial Sisters in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park

Readings of Mansfield Park which link the novel to empire and to Britain's heavy investment in the slave trade have assumed centre stage in the last decade, so much so that there is now a discernible backlash. This lecture re-visits the debate by situating Mansfield Park within the abolitionist movement's sentimental appeal to universal principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, all of which engaged several key philosophical and political issues, such as the imagining of kinship, claims to personhood, and the vexed relations of equality and difference.

Deirdre Coleman completed Honours in English at the University of Melbourne before going to Oxford University where she graduated with a BPhil (1979) in Victorian literature and a DPhil (1986) on Coleridge's journalism. Since returning to Australia she has taught at the Universities of Wollongong, Adelaide and Sydney. She is the author of several books, including most recently Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery (Cambridge University Press, 2005). She has published widely on eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature and cultural history, particularly in the areas of abolitionism, racial ideology, women's travel writing, colonialism and natural history. In December 2006 she was appointed Robert Wallace Chair of English at the University of Melbourne.