This volume is the third in the MLA Approaches series to deal with Austen's work (Pride and Prejudice and Emma were the subject of the first and second volumes on Austen, respectively). It provides information about editions, film adaptations, and digital resources, and then nineteen essays discuss various aspects of Mansfield Park, including the slave trade, the theme of reading, elements of tragedy, gift theory, landscape design, moral improvement in the spirit of Samuel Johnson and of the Reformation, sibling relations, card playing, and interpretations of Fanny Price, the heroine, not as passive but as having some control.
Marcia McClintock Folsom is professor of literature and chair of the Department of Humanities and Writing at Wheelock College. She is the editor of two MLA Approaches to Teaching volumes, on Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Emma, and she contributed an essay to Approaches to Teaching Woolf's To the Lighthouse.
John Wiltshire is adjunct professor in English at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of Samuel Johnson in the Medical World: The Doctor and the Patient, Jane Austen and the Body: "The Picture of Health," Recreating Jane Austen, and The Making of Dr. Johnson. He is the editor of the Cambridge University Press edition of Austen's Mansfield Park. The Hidden Jane Austen is his most recent book (2014).