Austen's Pride Research Articles

Communication Technology and Narrative: Letters, Instant Messaging, and Mobile Phones in Three Romantic Novels

How time and place are constructed in the novel and how readers perceive these features have been studied extensively. Less attention has been devoted to how communicative devices, such as letters, electronic messaging, or telephone calls, can influence both time and place by connecting characters in different locations. This article argues that the technical capabilities of different communication systems, when represented within a novel's story world, help determine the forms of plot, characterization, and narrative voice that a novelist can feasibly present. To demonstrate this, the argument compares three novels that share the generic conventions of romantic fiction: Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Helen Fielding's modern adaptations of Austen, Bridget Jones's Diary (1996) and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (1999). Each novel depicts potential lovers who are initially seen as socially incompatible in that they live or work in dissimilar places. In all three texts, communication systems help connect the characters and bridge the environments in which they normally reside, thereby allowing romance to develop. However, the speed, reliability, and materiality of the different types of technology available in their respective historical periods radically affect how their plots are expressed. Letters, instant messaging, and mobile telephony are “semiotic resources” that the novelist can use to structure her plot and narrative voice.

Romance Re-Scripted: Lost in Austen's comparative historical analysis of post-feminist culture

This paper argues that the British television drama serial Lost in Austen implicitly constructs a critical analysis of post-feminism. Firstly, it will argue that its complex narrative structure (travelling from contemporary London to the pages of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice) allows its female protagonist to ask important questions about the nature and relevance of feminism today. In particular, it enables it to rediscover feminist history in an attempt to reconnect it to a generation of young women who have arguably lost sight of its continuing significance. Secondly, it implicitly positions traditional romantic fiction as a cultural antidote to an overly sexualised post-feminist culture, one that continues to objectify the female subject while making young women complicit in their own oppression. In doing so, it arguably offers a critical evaluation of post-feminism while reinventing the emotional power of traditional romantic discourse for a contemporary age.

The “Dual Voice” of Free Indirect Discourse: A Reading Experiment with Croatian Speakers Reading a Literary Text in English and Croatian

The possibility of “dual voice” in free indirect discourse has attracted considerable attention in the fields of stylistics, cognitive science and literary criticism. An area suitable for empirical research studies in this regard is point of view and how it is identified during the reading process by non-native speakers as well as the role of translators in influencing the reader to accept a particular point of view. This paper presents results of a research study designed to examine how readers respond to free indirect discourse. The research considered four research questions:RQ1: Do readers hear a ‘dual voice’ when reading passages of free indirect discourse?RQ2: What kind of ‘contexts’ influence the identification of point of view?RQ3: Are there any differences in the results obtained between non-native speakers reading the original literary text and native speakers of the language reading the translation of the same original?RQ4: Has the translator influenced the readers of the translation in any way (thus serving as a “third voice”)?The text for the experiment was from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. The experiment was conducted with two groups of participants: 38 non-native university students studying English as one of their majors to become elementary school teachers of English and 40 university students and native speakers of Croatian studying to become elementary school teachers teaching all core subjects. The results show that a quarter of the study participants could hear the “dual voice” and that the translator's influence remained for the most part irrelevant. The difference between the two study groups was not substantial and the reasons for choosing their answers mentioned by the participants did not significantly differ.

Reading the Marriage Plot

Novels from the 18th and 19th centuries have powerfully shaped modern conceptions of marriage and family life. With the development of the British realist novel, the courtship and marriage plot took on a new cultural prominence that “naturalized” a deeply cultural institution and normalized a particular set of heterosexual gender roles. The cultural significance of these novels can be measured by their reverberations in contemporary popular culture and their impact on modern life stories. Jane Austen's (1813/2002) Pride and Prejudice and Helen Fielding's (1996) popular adaptation of Austen's novel, Bridget Jones's Diary, offer family theorists and researchers a case study on the influence of canonical plot structures on modern stories about marriage.

Az oszlopos körtemplom és az angolkert — az antikvitás vágyképe és aktualitása

Az oszlopos körtemplom és az angolkert — az antikvitás vágyképe és aktualitása

May, Lou and Cass: Jane Austen's Nieces in Ireland by Sophia Hillan (review)

Reviewed by: May, Lou and Cass: Jane Austen's Nieces in Ireland by Sophia Hillan Shannon Scott May, Lou and Cass: Jane Austen's Nieces in Ireland, by Sophia Hillan, pp. 294. Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2011. Distributed by Dufour Editions, Chester Springs PA. $34.95. Sophia Hillan begins each chapter in her study of Jane Austen's extended family and its connection to nineteenth-century Ireland with a quotation from one of Austen's novels, often using it as a clue to the drama that will unfold. She goes on to make parallels between many of the experiences of Jane Austen's nieces, Marianne Knight, Louisa Hill, and Cassandra Jane Hill (known as May, Lou, and Cass respectively) with characters from Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Persuasion—and in doing so, highlights the claim that fact can often be stranger than fiction. Hillan is an accomplished fiction writer, and as such, she is sensitive not only to the inspirational give-and-take between reality and invention, but also to the challenges and joys of being a writer—both as a novelist as Jane Austen was, and also as a "lay writer" like her nieces, who composed witty, heartfelt letters to numerous family and friends. Hillan's biography of the Austen family reads like an epistolary novel where the reader can hear the distinct voices of each "character." Hillan's introduction creates the "Janeite" base for the biography by revealing details about Jane Austen's final eight years at Chawton Cottage in Hampshire, and the close ties she had with her nieces and nephews to whom she devoted herself during visits. Alongside these idyllic memories of a fun and talented "maiden aunt," Hillan simultaneously shows the precarious existence of many unmarried women who were at the financial mercy of their male relatives. For Austen, the decision of where to live and with whom fell to her brother Edward Austen (who changed his name to Knight in 1812). While Edward settled at the Godmersham estate near Canterbury with his wife, Elizabeth Bridges, to start their prolific family of eleven children (including the three who are the focus of this book), Austen was situated at Chawton after many uncomfortable and uncertain years of roaming. Austen spent much time entertaining Edward's children, more so after Elizabeth's death in 1808, occurring when the oldest daughter Fanny was barely into her teens. In addition to comforting them in their grief, Austen took the children on trips to the theater in Covent Garden and to the dentist—bowing out herself in the latter. Austen is remembered fondly by her nieces for the occasions when she would read to them from her manuscripts, a privilege Marianne and Louisa were unfortunately too young to enjoy. As Austen grew older, and her health became increasingly frail, the visits from Edward's family became fewer. Edward, dealing with his own financial hardships, focused more attention on his eldest children entering the marriage market successfully—that is, marrying into money. Although Jane Austen was ill and near death, the Godmersham family prepared for the holidays [End Page 155] or traveled to Paris. Despite this seeming indifference to Austen's decline, the nieces felt the loss of their beloved aunt keenly, and in the next decade their lives would uncannily parallel those of the characters their aunt so poignantly captured in her prose. In the second and third chapters Hillan examines a dizzying array of proposals, rejections, courtships, and marriages for the Knight nieces. The courtships are frequently juxtaposed with scenes and characters from Austen's novels, and this is where a devoted Austen fan will have their reading pleasure intensified by being able to recognize the parallels and then create some of their own. Yes, readers may well find themselves nodding, "this is exactly like Captain Wentworth and Anne Elliot." Marianne, or May, was courted by a cousin James Edward, but could not marry him due to his lack of money. While Hillan compares Edward James to Edward Ferrars from Sense and Sensibility, Marianne is contrasted with both Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice and eventually Anne Elliot of Persuasion as marriage proposals for her slow...

The Vulgar Question of Money: Heiresses, Materialism, and the Novel of Manners from Jane Austen to Henry James by Elsie B Michie (review)

MICHIE, ELSIE B. Vulgar Question of Money: Heiresses, Materialism, and Novel of Manners from Jane Austen to Henry James. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. 303 pp. $70.00. Taking title from Frances Trollope's novel Life and Adventures of a Clever Woman, Elsie B. Michie's book examines a phenomenon that Trollope's novel crystallizes--the repugnance felt by Victorian (and contemporary) writers, readers, and critics towards open pursuit, accumulation, and display of wealth as an end in itself. It was precisely such behavior, according to Michie, that Victorians designated as in order to distance crass materialism from disinterested models of virtue, aesthetics, and taste. In examining how Victorians separated economic from noneconomic values, Michie's book contributes to an ongoing critical dialogue on how nineteenth century constituted aesthetic and moral value by disentangling it from economic. But while critics such as Mary Poovey and John Guillory have explored separation of aesthetic/moral value from economic value by providing intellectual histories of literary and economic discourses, Michie examines latter problem through a series of fine-grained analyses of novel of manners as it stretches from Jane Austen to Henry James. In these rigorously argued readings, Michie offers a circumscribed history of marriage plot in which she places the vulgar question of at forefront in order to demonstrate how notions of vulgarity structured nineteenth-century marriage plot and established within it a polarizing set of values (97). Michie's central contention in book is that novel's representations of vulgarity responded to broader cultural anxieties regarding impact of money on moral sentiments by gendering prurient forms of materialism in figure of heiress. Using Austen's Pride and Prejudice as paradigmatic example, Michie argues that female heiresses in Austen's novel, such as Miss Bingley and Lady Catherine, embody cloying materialism that novel then contrasts to poor, virtuous heroines like Elizabeth Bennett. traditional marriage-plot ending in which wealthy male suitor chooses poor, virtuous woman over wealthy counterpart quite literally marries virtue with wealth and thus cleanses wealth of negative connotations associated with rich woman. rich woman thus functions symbolically in marriage plot as a scapegoat for very economic motives that were becoming engine of a growing capitalist economy. In bringing attention to this unexamined figure within nineteenth-century novel, Michiejoins recent critics such as Kathy Alexis Psomiades, Mary Jean Corbett, and Sharon Marcus who have challenged traditional model of heterosexual exchange, elaborated most famously in Gayle Rubin's The Traffic in Women, which has dominated criticism on marriage-plot narrative. Instead of focusing on triangulation of a woman who is exchanged between two men, Michie proposes a rectangular structure that includes rich and poor woman as two possible choices (209). Drawing on nineteenth-century anthropologists such as John Ferguson McLennan, particularly latter's theory of endogamy and exogamy, Michie shows how heiress complicates model of heterosexual exchange since she cannot enter into an exogamous marriage in which wealth exits group/family but must remain within an endogamous union. Hence, whether in relation to materialistic values she represents or model of marriage she interrupts, heiress represents what L6vi-Strauss calls scandal in system of marital exchanges. She must be included in order for novel to establish values that exclude her (16). Each of five chapters in book explores book's central claims by examining three successive novels by each author, beginning first with Austen and then moving on to Frances Trollope, Anthony Trollope, Margaret Oliphant, and concluding with James. …

The Mysteries of Rereading

The Mysteries of Rereading Dawn Potter (bio) On Rereading by Patricia Meyer Spacks (Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2011. 304 pages. $26.95) Readers fall into two general but very uneven categories: those who read a book once and then rarely return to it and those who regularly reread. At least among adults this second category is far less common, and most of those who belong to it have some scholarly or pedagogical reason for revisiting books. Almost all "pure" rereaders—those insatiable consumers who crave stories like a drunk craves whiskey, who will finish a novel and then turn back to the beginning and read it straight through again—are children. The author Patricia Meyer Spacks is no exception to the rule. A retired professor of English who has taught at institutions such as Wellesley, Yale, and the University of Virginia, she is without question a professional rereader. Yet on page 1 of On Rereading, a memoir of her deliberate project to reread a variety of books she had read at least once, she quotes one of those rare adult rereaders who has allowed himself to revert to a childlike companionship with books: "Consider Larry McMurtry, writing in his early seventies: 'If I once read for adventure, I now read for security. How nice to be able to return to what won't change.' McMurtry reports that publishers keep sending him new books to comment on. He sends them back, preferring the books he already knows. 'When I sit down at dinner with a given book,' McMurtry writes, 'I want to know what I'm going to find.'" Spacks finds McMurtry's behavior appealing but unsatisfactory. To her his comment "suggests that a book reread offers what will not change— but for most rereaders, rereading provides, in contrast, an experience of repeated unexpected change." She seems, in this remark, to assume that McMurtry's preference for "know[ing] what I'm going to find" implies that he has a static relationship with what he reads. And that assumption, like her phrase for most rereaders, is telling; for Spacks almost entirely overlooks the existence of another small but important group of adult rereaders: people who reread because an intense nonanalytical relationship with a handful of books is essential to their own creative enterprises. This disconnect may seem subtle, but it influences nearly every element of this book—from the rereading project itself, to Spacks's analysis of her results, to the tone of her prose. Yet her gentle memoir has a great deal of charm, and the author is an appealing narrator who conveys on every page her deep, respectful, and abiding love for the way in which rereading affects our moral and emotional comprehension of the world. "Rereading," she notes, "is a way of paying attention. It takes books seriously and allows them to do their work: work that includes the changing of one's self and consequently of one's life, although in the nature of things we never quite glimpse the changes as they occur." As one might expect from a longtime teacher, Spacks planned her project carefully. She chose books [End Page lxxix] such as L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz and Munro Leaf's The Tale of Ferdinand that she had loved as a child but had not read since. She revisited books such as Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook and Saul Bellow's Herzog that she had strongly liked or disliked as a young adult. She considered "guilty pleasures"—books she had formerly found herself reading for relaxation, such as P. G. Wodehouse's stories and novels. Usually she had read her chosen book just once before, or years had elapsed since her last rereading. Only occasionally does she discuss novels such as Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice that she continues to reread regularly. Since Spacks has already published scholarly works addressing many of the novels that might have fallen into this last category, her choice of books is logical, for it provides a fresh way to note how time and memory can distort or clarify our relationship to literature. But the methodical rationales she lays out for her choices, the...

Resolving the Institution of Marriage in Eighteenth-Century Courtship Novels

Two features of the famous exchange between Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Elizabeth Bennett in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice —a crucial moment in a crucial courtship novel—are particularly significant: its treatment of marriage, and its use of the word "resolve." This moment reveals that in Jane Austen's portrayal of courtship, instead of submitting to authority and convention, a young woman takes charge of her own marriage. With the help of various critics, we have come to think of certain tropes, such as "sensibility," "reform," and "duty," to name a few, as central to our understanding of the eighteenth-century novel. I propose "resolve" as a trope of similar importance. The repeated use of "resolve" in the dialogue between Elizabeth and Lady Catherine represents a culmination of many decades of use of the language of "resolve" in crucial moments of courtship novels by authors including Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Frances Burney, and Ann Radcliffe. The contradictory definitions of "resolve" appeal to these authors. The paradox of language allows for, indeed helps to induce, the wellknown paradox of courtship novels: voluntary submission. Thus, Austen (and others) can use this language to empower their heroines while still emphasizing the sacrifice—the potential dissolution and disintegration of identity—that lurks behind every resolve.

Revisiting Classics: Relevance of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice

Although many readers and critics of the present era might consider Jane Austen's fictional writings to be outdated and clichéd, her work nevertheless retains an undying appeal. During the last decade of the twentieth century the English-speaking world has experienced an Austen renaissance as it has been treated to a number of film and television adaptations of her work. The reasons for viewers and readers enjoying and identifying with Austen's fiction are numerous. This paper contends that the 'mutual cognitive environment' which Jane Austen so skilfully and dexterously creates in her masterpiece Pride and Prejudice, accounts for its present day relevance and appeal. This claim will be elucidated and established through an analysis of the novel within the framework of the concept of a 'mutual cognitive environment' as explicated by Sperber and Wilson in their discussion of Relevance Theory (2002:249). The contention is prompted by the assumption that a comprehensive account of how this 'mutual cognitive environment' is created by Austen and the process of its interpretation by readers should generate accounts of how this text gives rise to particular effects. Further, the paper maintains that for the present-day reader of Pride and Prejudice this environment is created due to the interaction of contextual assumptions which include knowledge of hierarchical social status, predicament of women in a male-dominated society, and human traits.

FRANCES TROLLOPE'S ONE FAULT AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE NOVEL

This article positions Frances Trollope's One Fault (1840) between Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Anthony Trollope's He Knew He Was Right (1869). All three novels depict a marriage between a man who is significantly wealthier and of higher social status than the woman he chooses for love. As a sequence, the three show the gradual erosion of the husband's power. In the novels by Frances and Anthony Trollope, this portrait of a failure of marital power becomes a means of representing in fiction the challenges to social authority that were perceived to have been brought about by the legislative reforms of the nineteenth century. One Fault references the passage of the Reform Act in 1832, He Knew He Was Right that of the Second Reform Act in 1867. Comparing these two novels reveals changes in the perceived structure of marriage and of the relation between the classes that took place between the 1830s and '40s and the 1860s. The novel accommodated itself to these social forms by developing new conceptions of character and a new plot structure. These formal inventions allow the Trollopes to represent social and personal authority as dispersed over a range of positions rather than concentrated in a single place, the space typically represented by the husband as the emblem of patriarchal values.

Committing Freedom: The Cultivation of Judgment in Rousseau's Emile and Austen's Pride and Prejudice

Committing Freedom: The Cultivation of Judgment in Rousseau's Emile and Austen's Pride and Prejudice

Cues to the Imagination in Memoir, Science, and Fiction

To understand psychological functions of writing, in which words achieve a certain permanency, we discuss Petrarch's memoir of his ascent of Mont Ventoux, Galileo's scientific account of the laws governing falling bodies, and Cervantes's fictional account of Don Quixote's confrontation with windmills. In each case, written words function as cues, instructions to the reader, to construct scenes in the imagination. We analyze the writing of Jane Austen's (1813/1980) Pride and Prejudice and find three categories of cues: utterance, thought, and observation. These are essential to fiction, but a comparable range of cues occurs in other genres, which have different purposes and can draw on cues in different proportions. Fiction is, perhaps, distinctive in reaching imaginatively toward psychological laws.

The Technology of the Novel: Writing and Narrative in British Fiction

Reviewed by: The Technology of the Novel: Writing and Narrative in British Fiction Joseph W. Slade (bio) The Technology of the Novel: Writing and Narrative in British Fiction. By Tony E. Jackson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Pp. ix + 234. $55. When The Technology of the Novel does not read like a series of footnotes to Plato, who disparaged writing through his mouthpiece Socrates, it resembles confessions from a therapist's couch as canonical British novelists admit to skepticism about their enterprises. Tony E. Jackson's purpose, however, is to analyze the ways that storytelling capitulates to the technology of writing until hybrid media subsume narrative communication. Although Jackson distinguishes writing not only from language, but also from print, he declines to factor in mass production of novels, hoping instead to recapture the essential features of oral recitation and alphabetic writing before subsequent media alter them. This McLuhanesque strategy is glancingly successful; as Jackson concedes, "it is not entirely possible to think oneself out of literacy once writing has been learned" (p. 17). [End Page 1048] According to Jackson, the principal difference between oral and literate stories is between showing and telling. Oral speakers embody language through voice and gesture, "showing" a story through embellishment in time and space, responding to cues from alert live audiences already familiar with the ritual tale. By contrast, writers can only "tell" a story in a fixed form from which the disembodied author is physically removed but nonetheless responsible to the isolated reader for its content. Whatever is gained by realism, honesty, and sincerity is offset by the writer's invention; originality, as communication theorists remind us, comes at the price of uncertainty shared by both receiver and sender of messages. Complicating matters further is the tendency of readers to "naturalize" the written word to the point that they assume a narrator even when there is no such voice, as if the communication between writer and reader were, Jackson tells us, "telepathic." That we commonly use "storytelling" as the default term for both modes does not help. Even so, Jackson says, British authors have been troubled by the distance between showing and telling since the novel's inception, and their discontent constitutes a critique of the technology of writing itself. The greater their precision, the more "realistic" their artifice, the deeper the novelists' awareness of the lost intimacy and authority of live speech. Such nostalgia surfaces in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, in which the monster seems doubly divorced from nature because he must learn to speak by first learning to read and write. Less convincing as comment on technologies are Elizabeth's struggles in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice to reconcile what she hears with the correspondence she reads and the by-now-familiar indignities endured by characters oppressed by the letter of the law in Charles Dickens's Bleak House. Discussion of Virginia Woolf's experiments with multiple voices in The Waves, of E. M. Forster's focus on the collision between the oral culture of India and the literate colonialism of Britain in A Passage to India, and of Ian McEwan's warnings about the dangers of solipsistic writing in Atonement better advance the volume's argument. If novelists frustrated by inability to "show" a story do not yearn to sit in front of a tribe of listeners, what they do seem to want is articulated by Doris Lessing, whose fictional diarist in The Golden Notebook wishes that her story could be a movie. A little oddly, a final chapter considers the non-British Citizen Kane, a motion picture about how writing can obscure the resonant presence of a single word, and a medium that combines sound and image to boot. Despite this ending, Jackson insists that he intends no elegy for the novel, and it is probably significant that most of these novels have been translated to the screen. As new media reinterpret cultural artifacts, moreover, it is important to investigate how earlier technologies constructed meaning. Aside from frequent provocative insights, the volume's value may lie in Jackson's observation that conflating spoken and written language leads to post-structuralist [End Page 1049] trashing of meaning on the...

Interjections in the Performance of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

Three data sets of primary and secondary interjections were compared: (1) the original interjections written into the text of Jane Austen's (1813/1994) novel Pride and prejudice; (2) the interjections read aloud in commercial recordings by six professional readers of the entire text of the novel; (3) the interjections spoken by actresses and actors in the film production (Birtwistle and Langton in Pride and prejudice [TV Mini-series]. London: BBC TV, 1995) whose script, despite modest selectiveness, adheres most closely of all film versions to Austen's original text. Overall, the respective frequencies of occurrence of interjections were 136 < 141 < 398. Of the 136 interjections in Austen's printed text, 96% were attributable to women's roles, particularly Elizabeth Bennet and her mother. The second of these figures (141) is an average across all six readers. Hence, readers added a very modest number of interjections. But the actresses and actors added a large number of interjections. The dramatic oral expressiveness of the film performance is largely carried by and reflected in the actresses' and to a lesser extent in the actors' use of these primary interjections. These findings can well be related to Nübling's (Zeitschrift für Semiotik 26:11-45, 2004, Duden: Die Grammatik (pp 573-640). Mannheim: Dudenverlag, 2005) hypothesis of a spectrum of interjectional expressivity. But Ameka's (J Pragmat 18:101-118, 1992) linguistic hypothesis that pauses will both precede and follow interjections was once again found to be empirically groundless. A large percentage (96%) of the interjections in the film performance served the function of initializing various units of discourse, either after a pause before articulatory phrases, or before a sentence and/or turn. Both the emotional and initiating functions of interjections are characteristic of conceptual and medial orality rather than of conceptual and medial literacy. Accordingly, their usage throws further light on a theory of spontaneous spoken discourse.

An Object of Interest: Observing Elizabeth in Andrew Davies' Pride and Prejudice

Fourteen years after its first airing, screen writer Andrew Davies’ 1995 adaptation of Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice remains a benchmark against which Austen adaptation is popularly measured. Noted for its ‘sexing up’ of period drama, the adaptation ostensibly addresses modern sensibilities and contemporary dramatic expectations. Davies’ interpretive choices place an emphasis on sensuality and bring focus to Darcy's desires. Such choices, however, overwhelm the distinctly female point of view present in Austen's novel and work to position Elizabeth Bennet as a sexual commodity. Davies’ adaptation, therefore, demonstrates a surprisingly conservative reading of Pride and Prejudice.

The Feminist and Orientalist Perspective in Gurindher Chadha's Bride and Prejudice

This article discusses a movie by Gurindher Chandha's Bride and Prejudice which is an adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. The movie, despite being a mainstream one, contains critiques about patriarchy in Indian society and is against Western's orientalist notion about India. For these reasons, this article is trying to unfold how feminism and orientalism are presented in the movie.

The Distribution and Frequency of the Terms "Pride" and "Prejudice" in Jane Austen's &lt;i&gt;Pride and Prejudice&lt;/i&gt;

In this article we examine the title terms of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813) with particular attention to their distribution and frequency in the text. Our method is to connect the statistical material gathered on frequency and distribution to a narratological analysis of the terms, with special emphasis on whether they occur within the focalization of the external narrator, or that of character-focalizers. In order to approach this task, we have availed ourselves of the narratological theories of Mieke Bal. We conclude that there is a differentiation among types of focalization in the novel that enhances the thematic structure of match-making. Although Jane Austen wrote and published her major works two centuries ago, they continue to fascinate literary scholars and general readers alike.

Wit and Vivacity in Jane Austen's PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

The main problem of this research is to prove wit and vivacity in Jane Austen’s in Pride and Prejudice. To solve the problem the researcher applies structuralism approach in this study. This approach is used in order to find the wit and vivacity through character’s traits. They are physical trait, social trait and psychological trait.

The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (review)

Reviewed by: The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel Eric Hayot The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel. Alex Woloch. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. Pp. ix + 391. $65.00 (cloth); $21.95 (paper). Of the many tricks in Paul de Man's bag, my favorite has always been the one that reads a commonplace set of objections to a position as structural components of the position itself. If enough people consistently make the same "mistake" about something over a long enough period of time, de Man saw, we ought to read the mistake not as a mis- but as a taking, an apprehension that grasps something on the inside of a problem. Reading Alex Woloch's The One vs. the Many, I found myself frequently reminded of de Man's drive to "inscribe the polemics inside the question rather than having them determine it," a critical gesture Woloch pulls off with a great deal of flair and intelligence.1 The polemics in Woloch's book surround the longstanding struggle around the meaning and value of literary characters, which divides those (so often our students) who treat literary characters as people, from those who insist (after Barthes, Robbe-Grillet and other narratologists) that characters are simply sets of semantic units united by the "precious remainder" of a Proper Name.2 The problem with such disagreements, Woloch sees, is that "a literary dialectic that operates dynamically within the narrative text gets transformed into a theoretical contradiction, presenting students of literature with an unpalatable choice: language or reference, structure or individuality" (17). Better, he argues, to understand characters as acting with all the resonance and power of a fully implied humanity at the same time as they appear before us as narrative elements within a discursive structure organized according to rules of aesthetics, form, or genre. The One vs. the Many is a sustained examination, perhaps even a discovery of, "the junction between implied person and narrative form," an attempt "to read characterization in terms of the tension that narrative continually elicits between an individual who claims our interest and a fictional totality that forces this individual out of, or beneath, the discursive world" (38). The book's title refers to the novel's unequal distribution of discursive privilege, in which the figure of the protagonist, the "one," gains [End Page 339] its rich and textured humanity only in relation to the many minor characters: we know what "round" characters look like because we have the experience of "flat" ones. Minor characters emerge, Woloch argues, in the space between story and discourse, occupying a percentage of the words on the page that must be understood as intimately tied to their relevance to a story in which they never fully take part (but which nonetheless indicates their possible centrality to other stories). And any given novel's arrangement of discursive privilege can be understood as a "character-system" that structurally disposes its "character-spaces" in patterns that comment on and interact with the telling of its story. The distribution of such patterns, once seen, emerges into the readable. The task of Woloch's book is to demonstrate how and why such readings are worth pursuing. It does so through a sustained attention to three major nineteenth-century novels: Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Dickens's Great Expectations, and Balzac's Le Père Goriot. Each of these illustrates a different organization of the character-system, and in each case Woloch's readings offer not only an interrogation and elaboration of those systems but also a good deal of metacritical work designed to articulate his mode of reading. With Austen, for instance, Woloch shows how Elizabeth Bennet's interior development as an implied person mirrors (and in some sense refers to) her emergence as the novel's protagonist (and thus her "formal" or "structural" role), so that the "field of characterization rigorously links the protagonist's interior development to the dispersion and fragmentation of the many other minor characters" (124). As Elizabeth gains in narrative centrality, she also gains in discursive power, her thoughts taking...