Overview
- Offers a stylistic analysis of the full body Jane Austen’s work, including her juvenilia, early works and unfinished novel
- Takes account of the latest developments in the rapidly-expanding field of stylistics, and brings the study of Austen's language into the twenty-first century
- Challenges claims of a single dominant, centralising, and authoritative point of view in Austen’s fiction
- Presents a reassessment of Austen’s language that will challenge common critical assumptions
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Language, Literature and Style (PSLLS)
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Table of contents (10 chapters)
Keywords
- novel
- realism
- Persuasion
- Pride and Prejudice
- Mansfield Park
- Emma
- Sense and Sensibility
- Northanger Abbey
- metonymy
- narrative
- epistolary form
- Jane Austen
- stylistics
- omniscient narrator
- free indirect speech
- free indirect thought
- stylistic techniques
- figure of the reader
- literary diction
- British and Irish Literature
About this book
Reviews
“Joe Bray’s book is a refreshing departure from this prescription. In it, Professor Bray proposes to reacquaint us with the sophistication and experimental nature of Austen’s way with language, characterisation, and narrative technique through a series of close readings of key passages from her fiction using the analytic tools of modern stylistics. … Joe Bray has written an interesting and informative study, a useful guide for students wishing to understand the texture of Austen’s language.” (Kathryn Sutherland, Cercles, cercles.com, February, 2019)
“As competing versions of Everyone’s Dear Jane continue to proliferate, it is especially good to have this solid, subtle analysis of the many ways that Austen’s shimmering prose represents multiple and shifting points of view. Joe Bray argues that there is no omniscient, coercive author: the reader is in charge. Persuasively, leaning hard on especially brilliant passages, he demonstrates that Jane Austen engages and delights us by requiring us, precisely, to read.” (Rachel Brownstein, City University of New York, USA)
“Why do we so latch onto the bit of Austen’s letter where she writes of working on her “little bit (two inches wide) of ivory” to “little effect after much labour”, without factoring in that she is the greatest ironist in English literature? Rather we should notice her adjacent declaration: that she works with “so fine a brush”. Joe Bray’s authoritative study shows how very fine the brushwork of her language is: how viewpoint, evaluation, and knowledge of self and others is constantly shifting in her novels, and how this challenges the necessarily ‘active’ reader to keep up with these subtle illuminations of her characters’ uncertainties of motive and desire. Yes, she judges, but with compassion—as often empathetic and affectionate as ironizing and critical—as Bray’s meticulous stylistic exposition freshly reveals.” (Michael Toolan, University of Birmingham, UK)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Language of Jane Austen
Authors: Joe Bray
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Language, Literature and Style
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72162-0
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-72161-3Published: 20 February 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-89150-7Published: 10 May 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-72162-0Published: 12 February 2018
Series ISSN: 2731-8265
Series E-ISSN: 2731-8273
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: IX, 182
Topics: Stylistics, Eighteenth-Century Literature, Language and Literature, Poetry and Poetics, British and Irish Literature