Jane Austen

Download or read book Jane Austen written by Marvin Mudrick and published by Berkshire Publishing Group. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Has there ever been a critic of Jane Austen equal to her verve, her animation and independence of thought? Marvin Mudrick’s Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery, his first book, was published in 1952, and remains a fundamental work of commentary on Austen. It is filled with idiosyncratic insights about what makes Austen’s novels so daring and alive. Mudrick writes, for example, that this book “began as an essay to document my conviction that Emma is a novel admired, even consecrated, for qualities which it in fact subverts or ignores.” He goes on to show Austen to be a writer of irreverent sensibilities who, despite the constricted circumstances of her life, managed to create in her novels an enduring microcosm of the larger world. Mudrick examines her writings as aspects of a developing personal irony, an irony that later became the vital principles of her art. It was her ironic detachment, he maintains, that enabled her to expose and dissect, in novels that are masterpieces of comic wit and brilliant satire, the follies and delusions of eighteenth-century English society—and of human society even today.