Elegantly Vulgar: Jane Austen and Eighteenth-Century Vulgarity (original) (raw)
Related papers
2018
This chapter examines a commonplace in Austen criticism: the association between the correct use of language and moral worth. While those characters who use language imprecisely in her fiction are often shown to be disagreeable or dishonest, it is also the case that those who are over-precise and prescriptive are not endorsed unequivocally. With particular attention to Sense and Sensibility and Emma, Bray argues that the vulgar use of language can be a sign of moral goodness in Austen’s fiction, and that those who judge others on their linguistic habits are often the target of satire.
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.
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.
Jane Austen and her Readers, 1786–1945
2009
Jane Austen and her Readers, 17861945 is a study of the history of reading Jane Austens novels. It discusses Austens own ideas about books and readers, the uses she makes of her reading, and the aspects of her style that are related to the ways in which she has been read. The volume considers the role of editions and criticism in directing readers responses, and presents and analyses a variety of source material related to the ordinary readers who read Austens works between 1786 and 1945.
2018
Language, Style and Literature is a new series of books in literary stylistics. The series offers rigorous and informative treatments of particular writers, genres and literary periods and provides in-depth examination of their key stylistic tropes. Every volume in the series is intended to serve as a key reference point for undergraduate and postgraduate students and as an investigative resource for more experienced researchers. The last twenty years have witnessed a huge transformation in the analytic tools and methods of modern stylistics. By harnessing the talent of a growing body of researchers in the field, this series of books seeks both to capture these developments and transformations and to establish and elaborate new analytic models and paradigms.
The Blush of Modesty or the Blush of Shame? Reading Jane Austen's Blushes
Forum for Modern Language Studies, 2006
Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body". Even as she rebukes the writers of novels who disown their own creations, the narrator of Jane Austen"s Northanger Abbey famously attempts to rehabilitate the reputation of the female-authored novel, commending Cecilia, Camilla and Belinda, and calling for team spirit. (Northanger Abbey, pp.32-33). 1 Austen rightly recognises an extensive contemporary body of opinion against the novel: "no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are as many as our readers". But she also insists that "our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world" (p.32). Austen reacts in a variety of ways to her contemporaries" diatribes against reading the novel: by attributing a fear of the novel to the idiotic Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice, for example, she neatly exposes the idiocy of the fear; in Northanger Abbey she legitimises the novel by claiming for it the qualities more commonly attributed to the irreproachable periodical essay; by exposing and regendering stereotypes such as that of the girl led astray by romances in Sanditon, she indicates the gendered absurdity of such stereotypes. Her own sane and rational novels, with their emphasis on the domestic and the everyday, and their small cast of characters and limited social milieu, form a corrective both to the more absurd and melodramatic of her contemporaries" works, and also to the critics and readers who tar all novels with the same brush. I would like to suggest here that Jane Austen"s prose style enacts a similar corrective to notions of the novel"s frivolity, demanding the kind of strenuous reading more commonly associated by eighteenth-century moralists with the reading of non-fictional prose. Mary Poovey argues that Austen, like Mary Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft, was driven by the dictates of propriety, as manifested in the domestic ideology, to use strategies of "indirection and accommodation", which appear at the level of content and form "as resolutions blocked at one level of a narrative and then displaced by other subjects that are more amenable to symbolic transformation". An example is "Austen"s imposition of a romantic resolution on the realistic premise of Pride and Prejudice". 2 Throughout this article, I agree with Poovey that Austen employs strategies of indirection that are grounded in conduct-book notions of propriety. Where she sees such strategies as limiting and defensive, however, I argue that they are in fact pleasurable and defiant, forming part of the games of "Ingenuity" that Austen plays with her readers. "I do not write for such dull Elves / As have not a great deal of Ingenuity themselves", Austen
"Woman Is Fine for Her Own Satisfaction Alone": Fashion in Jane Austen's Letters
Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities, 2013
Covering the span dating from 9 January 1796 to 28 May 1817 and recording all her highly important little matters, Jane Austen’s letters to her sister, Cassandra, and others reflect her never-failing interest in the discourse of apparel. In the opening of this article, I will use the narrator’s sarcastic but oversimplified view of women’s complicated relationships with clothes in Northanger Abbey as well as the picture of the autonomous woman revealed in the letters concerned to point out the title quotation’s double meanings. With a number of instances extracted from the letters and novels by Austen, I will further examine the paradox intrinsic in the two kinds of writings in relation to clothes and argue that the author’s preoccupation with the matter of dress recounted in her life writing stand as counterpoint to the relatively conservative sumptuary notions conveyed in her creative works. Drawing on her epistolary account of fashion and dress, this article will also investigate how Austen managed to play the game of fashion for pleasure and demonstrated her free will through the exertion. In the end, I will maintain that to our fair author, fashion created variations and novelties to relieve her and her loved ones of the humdrum of everyday life. And, her letters simultaneously lay bare the minutiae of her life and attest to the ultra-significance she attached to life’s little things. 本篇論文主要探究涵蓋於奧斯汀(Jane Austen, 1775-1817) 書信，她珍視且暱稱的「我所有的重要瑣事」(all my important nothings)中的時尚議題。此論文首先點出奧斯汀藉《諾桑葛大宅院》(Northanger Abbey, 1817) 敍述者「女為悅己而容」(Woman is fine for her own satisfaction alone)文字嘲諷的表象之外，所傳達的「女性自主」概念；繼而論述奧斯汀在書信中對服裝相關議題的高度關注，與她小說裡相對保守的衣著概念形成強烈且有趣的對比；進而探究在真實生活裡，奧斯汀藉由把玩時尚潮流，展現她的自由意志與自主性。論文的重要性在其成功論證奧斯汀書信和小說兩種書寫對衣著描述上所蘊含的矛盾，以及時尚衣著對她真實生活的重要性。論文主張時尚衣著為奧斯汀和她所愛的人們，增添日常生活的多樣性和新奇感；這些日常瑣事與點滴對奧斯汀而言，具有莫大的意義。
The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1740–1830
2004
This volume offers an introduction to British literature that challenges the traditional divide between eighteenth-century and Romantic studies. Contributors explore the development of literary genres and modes through a period of rapid change. They show how literature was shaped by historical factors including the development of the book trade, the rise of literary criticism, and the expansion of commercial society and empire. The first part of the volume focuses on broad themes including taste and aesthetics, national identity and empire, and key cultural trends such as sensibility and the gothic. The second part pays close attention to the work of individual writers including Sterne, Blake, Barbauld, and Austen, and to the role of literary schools such as the 'Lake' and 'Cockney' schools. The wide scope of the collection, juxtaposing canonical authors with those now gaining new attention from scholars, makes it essential reading for all students of eighteenth-century literature and Romanticism.