Jane Austen's Youthful Art of Anticlimax (original) (raw)
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The Tensions of Jane Austen’s Epistolary Style
2020
Jane Austen’s letters contain few insights into her practice or philosophy as a writer. A series of letters in 1814 to her niece Anna offer comments and advice on the ongoing novel which this budding author has sent her aunt for feedback, but these are mainly of a practical nature, concerning such matters as names, titles and etiquette (‘And when Mr Portman is first brought in, he wd not be introduced as the Honble—That distinction is never mentioned at such times;—at least I beleive not’). The majority of the letters which survive are concerned with day-to-day, rather than literary or intellectual, concerns. Jane’s letters to her sister Cassandra in particular are full of commonplace gossip between sisters, which could strike a modern reader as trivial, even frivolous. Their structure and style are, as many critics have noticed, akin to the spontaneity and rapidity of speech. In the novels such breathless letters are frequently a sign of negligent behaviour, even moral weakness. Ho...
The complexity of the simple. The use of language in Jane Austen's novels
In recent years, a large number of books and articles on Jane Austen have been published, in which various aspects of her works and the stories told in them are analyzed. Many of these studies focus on extraliterary aspects, or delve into only some elements of the plots of this author's novels, the issues that are treated, or their social impact. These studies can be of great interest and add a relevant perspective to understanding the novels of Austen. However, to have a global vision of the work of this author, it is necessary to analyze the most literary aspects of Austen's writings in detail. In this article, we will study how Jane Austen used language, some of the most frequent resources, and the strategies she employed to provoke different effects on readers through the choice of certain words and syntactic structures.
Through a close reading of Jane Austen’s last four completed novels, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion, the importance of character studies in literary criticism is highlighted. It is claimed that Austen’s heroines all epitomise a central concern with the possibility of personal freedom and growth in a restrictive society and a central observance of strive for truthfulness in human interaction. Going behind the romantic outer layer of each novel, this thesis analyses the narrative ploys applied to demonstrate the main characters’ need to fight for personal fulfilment as uncorrupted self-realisation. This reading underlines the author’s use of irony both on a textual, inter-textual and meta-level that explains the on-going research interest in her oeuvre. Unlike the majority of modern Austen studies, this thesis argues for the centrality of a character studies approach that focuses on the agency of Austen’s main characters. Regarding character studies as a valuable synergetic force in Austen studies, the heroines are seen as central to the novels’ message and narratology; style and composition are analysed as part of character studies rather than the other way around. In this context, some of Austen’s influential narratological devices such as free indirect speech, impressionistic dramatic effect, and ellipsis are analysed and a need for a new awareness of character in literary theory is underlined. The role of the narrator in connection to the author and reader and Austen’s manipulation with both in-text characters and reader through her narrator show how the act of reading in general, and specifically the act of reading character within the novels, are closely linked. Studying Austen’s mature work underlines the benefits of reading as authorial readers. This thesis claims that Austen’s deep concern with morally sound value systems and her main characters’ integrity stems from a number of philosophical and religious influences that can be described as a neo-Aristotelian outlook.
Dramatic Structure in Jane Austen's Novels
Sensibilities (Volume 64), 2022
Thinking about Austen’s self-awareness as an author leads to chicken-and-egg questions about how she absorbed influences and transformed them into literature. This makes for interesting speculation. What plays did she attend? What did she read? What was in her father’s library? What was discussed when families and neighbours gathered around the fireplace at night? Austen was a storyteller who influenced how the literary arts developed. She is often compared with another storyteller, Shakespeare, who influenced how the dramatic arts developed. Both have been studied, down the generations, as explorers of character and motivation, the power of dialogue and indirect speech, the nature of love, the embodiment of social mores, the heroine’s capacity for self-awareness—her ability to change and grow—and the human condition. He wrote plays. She wrote novels. These are different forms of representational art, art that represents aspects of reality in ways that have lifelikeness (verisimilitude). Jane wrote juvenilia during her teenage years. She saved her juvenilia in three notebooks titled Volume the First, Volume the Second, and Volume the Third, to form a three-volume novel. Jane was proud of her juvenilia. This was unusual. Juvenilia are often associated with naivety, and few authors wish to be thought naïve. For example, Fanny Burney famously destroyed her juvenilia on her fifteenth birthday, as a rite of passage. Critics are ambivalent about Jane’s juvenilia. Chapman talked them down, as detracting from her stature as a mature novelist. Chesterton took a more positive view of their exuberant, offbeat, raucous comedy, calling them Rabelaisian and Dickensian, with echoes of Gargantua and Pickwick. They describe behaviours she could not write about as an adult, like biting off fingers. As this precocious but talented young woman entered adulthood, she had to adopt a mature literary persona. So, do her novels conform to a theory of mimesis, a theory of art imitating nature or life?
A Stylistic Study of Narrative Elements in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice
2022
The paper aims at the plot organization of the novel under study to decipher its structure and deep meaning. The narrative structure of the novel is analyzed from the category of narrative transformation proposed by French Linguist Tzvetan Todorov. The selected chapter from the novel i.e. Pride and Prejudice has also been analyzed keeping in view the sub categories of narrative transformation. This study will surely benefit the students to develop their linguistic competence through literature and make the readers understand the basic nuisances of literary writings. For the sake of brevity and the limitation of this paper, the researcher has analyzed the chapter-I as it’s not possible to take up all the chapters for the analysis.