Literary Theory: Weekly Response 9

"What I thought I was doing was acquiring the language and repertoire of analytic techniques called for implicitly by the inherent features of self-evidently great works of literary art. But I was troubled by my clumsiness. This was not a language I felt very comfortable with or wielded naturally with any sort of grace or independence."

- A Feeling for Books, Page 2, Radway

"Elizabeth feeling all the more than common awkwardness and anxiety of his situation, now forced herself to speak; and immediately, though not very fluently, gave him to understand, that her sentiments had undergone so material a change, since the period to which he alluded, as to make her receive with gratitude and pleasure, his present assurances."

- Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

When the language she uses is sometimes complex and confusing to readers, how is Jane Austen still able to get her point across effectively?

Jane Austen tends to use a lot of excess words when she writes, adding in more complex words in both the dialogue and in her narrations. Though parts of Pride and Prejudice can seem to be too wordy to understand clearly, she does a good job of pulling in explanations every so often, summarizing what is going on at that point in the novel. When Darcy proposes to Elizabeth and she accepts, there is a lot of length to the dialogue as well as the explanation, but the reader is still able to get a sense of how the characters are thinking and feeling and what is happening at that point in the story.