What are post- colonial study, Diaspora and New criticism?

Name: Dhruvi chavda
Roll no:6
Assignment:What are post- colonial study, Diaspora and New criticism?

What is Post- colonial Study: -

Postcolonial (sometimes post-colonial) studies are a way of analyzing literature with a focus on the effects of European and American colonization. The postcolonial period dates from 1957 to today. Many African countries achieved formal independence during the 1960’s.
 

In this post-colonial period, the majority of African states operate under some form of Presidential rule. Only a few of the states were able to maintain democratic governments permanently.

Postcolonial literature is a body of literary writing that responds to the intellectual discourse of European colonization in Asia, Africa, Middle East, the Pacific and elsewhere. Postcolonial literature addresses the problems and consequences of the decolonization of a country and of a nation, especially the political and cultural independence of formerly subjugated colonial peoples; it also covers literary critiques of and about postcolonial literature, the undertones of which carry, communicate, and justify racialism and colonialism. But most contemporary forms of postcolonial literature present literary and intellectual critiques of the postcolonial discourse by endeavoring to assimilate post colonialism and its literary expressions.

Post-colonial literally means after colonization. So, in context, a post-colonial fairytale/myth is anything that originated with the Western peoples that colonized the United States. This era was characterized by strive for the American literary identity. Post colonial refers to a historical phase undergone by Third World countries after the decline of colonialism.

At the first glance post colonial studies would seem to be a matter of history and political science, rather than literary criticism. However, we must remember that English as in “English Department” or “English Literature” has been since the age of the British Empire a global language. Postcolonial literary theorists study the English language within this politicized context, especially those writings that developed at the colonial “front” such as works by Rudyard Kipling, E.M foster, Jean Rhys, or Jamaica Kincaid.

Said’s concept of orientalism was an important touchstone to postcolonial Studies, as he described the stereotypical discourse about the East as constructed by the West. This discourse rather than realistically portraying Eastern “Others”, construct them based upon Western anxieties and preoccupations. Said sharply critiques the western images of the oriental as ‘irrational, depraved (fallen), child-like, ‘different’, “which has allowed the west to define itself as “rational, virtuous, mature, ‘normal’ ”.

Homi K. Bhabha’s postcolonial theory involves analysis of nationality, ethnicity, and politics with poststructuralist ideas of identity and indeterminacy, defining postcolonial identities as shifting, hybrid constructions. Bhabha critiques the presumed dichotomies between center and periphery, colonized and colonizer, self and other, borrowing from deconstruction the argument that these are false binaries.

Post colonial critics accordingly study diasporic texts outside the usual Western genres, especially productions by aboriginal authors, marginalized ethnicities, immigrants, and refugees. Post colonial literature from immerging nations by such writers as Chinua Achebe and Salman Rushdie are read alongside European responses to colonialism by writers such as George Orwell and Albert Camus. We can see some powerful conflicts arising from the colonial past in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, for example, which deconstructs from a postcolonial viewpoint the history of modern India.

Among the most important figures in post colonial feminism is Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who examines the effects of political independence upon “subaltern” or subprolrtarian women in the Third world. Spivak’s subaltern studies reveal how female subjects are silenced by the dialogue between the male- dominated west and the male- dominated east, offering little hope for the subaltern women’s voice to rise up amidst the global social institutions that oppress her.

New criticism:-

New Criticism was a formalist movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the a middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object. The movement derived its name from John Crowe Ransom's 1941 book The New Criticism. The work of English scholar I. A. Richards, especially his Practical Criticism and The Meaning of Meaning, which offered what was claimed to be an empirical scientific approach, were important to the development of New Critical methodology.  Also very influential were the critical essays of T. S. Eliot, such as "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and "Hamlet and His Problems", in which Eliot developed his notion of the "objective correlative". Eliot's evaluative judgments, such as his condemnation of Milton and Shelley, his liking for the so-called metaphysical poets and his insistence that poetry must be impersonal, greatly influenced the formation of the New Critical canon. New Criticism developed as a reaction to the older philological and literary history schools of the US North, which, influenced by nineteenth-century German scholarship, focused on the history and meaning of individual words and their relation to foreign and ancient languages, comparative sources, and the biographical circumstances of the authors. These approaches, it was felt, tended to distract from the text and meaning of a poem and entirely neglect its aesthetic qualities in favor of teaching about external factors. On the other hand, the literary appreciation school, which limited itself to pointing out the "beauties" and morally elevating qualities of the text, was disparaged by the New Critics as too subjective and emotional. Condemning this as a version of Romanticism, they aimed for newer, systematic and objective method. It was frequently alleged that the New Criticism treated literary texts as autonomous and divorced from historical context, and that its practitioners were “uninterested in the human meaning, the social function and effect of literature.” 

Indicative of the reader-response school of theory, Terence Hawke writes that the fundamental close reading technique is based on the assumption that “the subject and the object of study—the reader and the text—are stable and independent forms, rather than products of the unconscious process of signification," an assumption which he identifies as the "ideology of liberal humanism,” which is attributed to the New Critics who are “accused of attempting to disguise the interests at work in their critical processes.” For Hawkes, ideally, a critic ought to be considered to “[create] the finished work by his reading of it, and [not to] remain simply an inert consumer of a ‘ready-made’ product.”

In response to critics like Hawkes, Cleanth Brooks, in his essay "The New Criticism" (1979), argued that the New Criticism was not diametrically opposed to the general principles of reader-response theory and that the two could complement one another. For instance, he stated, "If some of the New Critics have preferred to stress the writing rather than the writer, so have they given less stress to the reader—to the reader's response to the work. Yet no one in his right mind could forget the reader. He is essential for 'realizing' any poem or novel. Reader response is certainly worth studying." However, Brooks tempers his praise for the reader-response theory by noting its limitations, pointing out that, "to put meaning and valuation of a literary work at the mercy of any and every individual [reader] would reduce the study of literature to reader psychology and to the history of taste."

New Criticism emphasizes explication, or "close reading," of "the work itself." It rejects old historicism's attention to biographical and sociological matters. Instead, the objective determination as to "how a piece works" can be found through close focus and analysis, rather than through extraneous and erudite special knowledge. It has long been the pervasive and standard approach to literature in college and high school curricula.
New Criticism, incorporating Formalism, examines the relationships between a text's ideas and its form, between what a text says and the way it says it. New Critics "may find tension, irony, or paradox in this relation, but they usually resolve it into unity and coherence of meaning" (Biddle 100). New Criticism attempts to be a science of literature, with a technical vocabulary, some of which we all had to teach in junior high school English classes (third-person, denouement, etc.). Working with patterns of sound, imagery, narrative structure, point of view, and other techniques discernible on close reading of the text, they seek to determine the function and appropriateness of these to the self-contained work.
New Critics, especially American ones in the 1940s and 1950s, attacked the standard notion of "expressive realism," the romantic fallacy that literature is the efflux of a noble soul, that for example love pours out onto the page in 14 iambic pentameter lines rhyming ABABCD etc. The goal then is not the pursuit of sincerity or authenticity, but subtlety, unity, and integrity--and these are properties of the text, not the author. The work is not the author's; it was detached at birth. The author's intentions are "neither available nor desirable" (nor even to be taken at face value when supposedly found in direct statements by authors). Meaning exists on the page. Thus, New Critics insist that the meaning of a text is intrinsic and should not be confused with the author's intentions nor the work's affective dimension (its impressionistic effects on the reader). The "intentional fallacy" is when one confuses the meaning of a work with the author's purported intention (expressed in letters, diaries, interviews, for example). The "affective fallacy" is the erroneous practice of interpreting texts according to the psychological or emotional responses of readers, confusing the text with its results.

Diaspora: - Diaspora Literature involves an idea of a homeland, a place from where the displacement occurs and narratives of harsh journeys undertaken on account of economic compulsions. Basically Diaspora is a minority community living in exile. The Oxford English Dictionary 1989 Edition (second) traces the etymology of the word 'Diaspora' back to its Greek root and to its appearance in the Old Testament as such it references.

However, the 1993 Edition of Shorter Oxford's definition of Diaspora can be found. While still insisting on capitalization of the first letter, 'Diaspora' now also refers to 'anybody of people living outside their traditional homeland.

In the tradition of indo-Christian the fall of Satan from the heaven and humankind's separation from the Garden of Eden, metaphorically the separation from God constitute diasporic situations. Etymologically, 'Diaspora' with its connotative political weight is drawn from Greek meaning to disperse and signifies a voluntary or forcible movement of the people from the homeland into new Under Colonialism, 'Diaspora' is a multifarious movement which involves-

The temporary or permanent movement of Europeans all over the world, leading to Colonial settlement. Consequent’s, consequently the ensuing economic exploitation of the settled areas necessitated large amount of labor that could not be fulfilled by local populace. This leads to: 
The Diaspora resulting from the enslavement of Africans and their relocation to places like the British colonies. After slavery was out lowed the continued demand for workers created indenturement labor. This produces: 
Large bodies of the people from poor areas of India, China and other to the West Indies, Malaya Fiji. Eastern and Southern Africa, etc. regions." Indian Diaspora can be classified into two kinds:

1. Forced Migration to Africa, Fiji or the Caribbean on account of slavery or indentured labor in the 18th or 19th century.

2.Voluntary Migration to U.S.A., U.K., Germany, France or other European countries for the sake of professional or academic purposes.

 The diasporian authors engage in cultural transmission that is equitably exchanged in the manner of translating a map of reality for multiple readerships. Diasporic writings are to some extent about the business of finding new Angles to enter reality; the distance, geographical and cultural enables new structures of feeling. 

Name Dhruvi Chavda
Roll no:6
Assignment: Oliver Twist as the macabre of childhood:

Oliver Twist as the macabre of childhood:

About Charles Dickens:-

·      Charles John Huffam Dickens is the full name of Dickens.

·      He was born on 7 February 1812 and died on 9 June 1870.

·      He was an English writer and social critic.

·     He created some of the world's most well-known fictional characters and is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period.

^·        During his period, his works enjoyed unprecedented popularity, and by the twentieth century he was widely seen as a literary genius by critics and scholars.

^·        His novels and short stories continue to be widely popular.

^·        Charles Dickens wrote many works during his period.

His major works are as under:

Sketches by Boz (1836) 

The Pickwick Papers (1837) 

Oliver Twist (1839) 

Nicholas Nickleby (1839) 

The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) 

Barnaby Rudge (1841)

 
A Christmas Carol (1843) 

The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (1844)

 
Dombey and Son (1848) 

David Copperfield (1850) Bleak House (1853) 

Hard Times (1854) 

Little Dorrit (1857) 

A Tale of Two Cities (1859) 

Great Expectations (1861)

 
Our Mutual Friend (1865) 

The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870)     

About “Oliver Twist”:-     

Oliver Twist is one of his best works. It is the    story of a young orphan boy, Oliver, and his attempts to stay good in a society that refuses to help. Oliver Twist shows perfectly how children were abused in Victorian era. Oliver is born in a workhouse, to a mother not known to anyone in the town. She dies right after giving birth to him, and Oliver is sent to the parochial orphanage, where he and the other orphans are treated terribly and fed very little. They were suffering from slow starvation. When he turns nine, he is sent to the workhouse, where again he and the others are treated badly and practically starved.

 

The other boys, unable to stand their hunger any longer, decide to draw straws to choose who will have to go up and ask for more food. Oliver loses. On the appointed day, after finishing his first serving of gruel, he goes up and asks for more. Mr. Bumble, the beadle, and the board are outraged, and decide they must get rid of Oliver, apprenticing him to the parochial undertaker, Mr. Sowerberry. It is not great there either, and after an attack on his mother’s memory, Oliver runs away. Oliver walks towards London. When he is close, he is so weak he can barely continue, and he meets another boy named Jack Dawkins, or the artful Dodger. The Dodger tells Oliver he can come with him to a place where a gentleman will give him a place to sleep and food, for no rent. Oliver follows, and the Dodger takes him to an apartment in London where he meets Fagin, the aforementioned gentleman, and Oliver is offered a place to stay. Oliver eventually learns that Fagin’s boys are all pickpockets and thieves, but not until he is wrongfully accused of their crime of stealing an old gentleman’s handkerchief. He is arrested, but the bookseller comes just in time to the court and says that he saw that Oliver did not do it. The gentleman whose handkerchief was taken, Mr. Brownlow, feels bad for Oliver, and takes him in. Oliver is very happy with Mr. Brownlow, but Fagin and his co-conspirators are not happy to have lost Oliver, who may give away their hiding place. So one day, when Mr. Brownlow entrusts Oliver to return some books to the bookseller for him, Nancy spots Oliver, and kidnaps him, taking him back to Fagin.  Charles Dickens shows The Victorian England the time of “Oliver Twist”.

What is Macabre?

• Having death as a subject.

• Things that involve the horror of death or violence.

 • A story involves lots of blood and gore.

The word macabre comes from the Middle French phrase Danse Macabré, "the Dance of Death," which was a popularsubject of art and literature in the late Middle Ages. The original meaning of Macabré in the French termDanse Macabré is not known with any certainty, but it may be an alteration of Old French Macabe, "a Maccabee." The Maccabees were Jewish martyrs honored by a feast day in the Western Church.

We also can say that these are the adjective of macabre: gruesome, grim, ghastly, frightening, ghostly, weird, dreadful, unearthly, hideous, eerie, grisly, horrid, morbid,frightful, ghoulish.

Macabre of childhood in ‘Oliver Twist’:-

Dickens presents a portrait of the macabre childhood of a considerable number of Victorian orphans. The character of Oliver Twist represents the situation of Child labor. Fagin, a devil figure, corrupts all the children he meets, making them work as thieves in exchange for a macabre sense of 'the home' and 'the family'. G. K. Chesterton: “ A modern realist describing the dreary  workhouse would have made all the children utterly crushed, not daring to speak at all, not expecting anything, not hoping anything, past all possibility of affording even an ironical contrast or a protest of despair. A modern, in short, would have made all the boys in the workhouse pathetic because he is pessimists. But Oliver Twist is not pathetic because  he is pessimist. Oliver Twist is pathetic because he is an optimist. The whole tragedy of that incident is in fact that he does expect the universe to be kind to him, that he does believe that he is living in a just world. He comes before the Guardians …… with gloomy experiences, but he comes with a happy philosophy. Dickens knows that there are wrongs of man to be cursed; but he believes also that there are rights of man to be demanded.

Oliver Twist plunges into a confined world of darkness, and oppressive, lurid intensity from the workhouse to the criminal slum and the jail. In its heart lurks the smoky and fetid thieves’ kitchen where the Artful Dodger leers and Fagin grins in mirth through the greasy air. Almost all its interiors are bleak and gloomy: the workhouse where half-starved boys whimper with hunger in the bare stone hall and scrawny hags hang over the beds of the dying, the peephole back room of the Three Cripples, the ruined warehouse where Monks terrifies Bumble by night. Eve when Oliver rests asleep at Mrs. Maylie’s just beyond the window loom Fagin ad Monks, darkening the sunlight like two monstrous demons. The very outdoors huddle under a heavy sky of evil. Nancy lurks in black shadow on the slimy steps of London Bridge; Sikes wanders in horror-haunted flight away from and back to the city, the waving torches glimmer on the mud of Folly Ditch while the murderer clambers over the titles of the barricaded house. And the end narrows in relentlessly with Fagin cowered in the condemned cell, gnawing his nails and glaring at the close wall.”

Child abasement: -

Boys treated as a labor and they starving for needy stomach. When we read the story we can feel humiliations and helpless condition of orphan children. In workhouse all the children are treated terribly and fed very little. He observes and describes many categories of child abasement. Oliver's mother dies in childbirth. She is attended by a drunken “midwife” and an uncaring doctor. The infant is turned over to a baby farm and later the workhouse itself. The children here are neglected, barely fed or clothed. Oliver Twist's ninth birthday found him

“a pale thin child, somewhat diminutive in stature, and decidedly small in circumference”.

 They were also adult love or affection and constantly criticized. Up to his ninth birthday, Oliver was said to have come

 “from the wretched home where one kind word or look had never lighted the gloom of his infant years”.

 “a naughty orphan which nobody can't love”.

 “Tortures of slow starvation”:-

Nine-year-old Oliver is a resident in the parish workhouse where the Oliver, boys are "issued three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a volte week, and half a roll on Sundays." The workhouse is run by Bumble the Beadle; Limbkins is Chairman of the Board of Guardians for the workhouse. The room, in which the boys were fed.  The bowls never wanted washing. The boys polished them with their spoons till they shone again; and when they had performed this operation. Oliver Twist and his companions suffered the tortures of slow starvation for three months: at last they got so voracious and wild with hunger, that one boy, who was tall for his age, and hadn't been used to that sort of thing (for his father had kept a small cook-shop), hinted darkly to his companions, that unless he had another basin of gruel per diem, he was afraid he might some night happen to eat the boy who slept next him, who happened to be a weakly youth of tender age. Child as he was, he was desperate with hunger, and reckless with misery. He rose from the table; and advancing to the master, basin and spoon in hand, said: somewhat alarmed at his own temerity:

 'Please, sir, I want some more.'

The master was a fat, healthy man; but he turned very pale. 'What!' said the master at length, in a faint voice?

Oliver replied 'Please, sir, I want some more.'

The master aimed a blow at Oliver's head with the ladle.

Conclusion: - Charles Dickens’ portray of character and a situation of Orphan child in the Victorian era is highlighted very properly. In which orphan child, a deadly way to go every misery comes in their way. “It’s an already a 230 macabre of childhood”.

Name: Dhruvi Chavda
Roll no:6
Assignment:Jane Austen’s style of writing           

            Jane Austen’s style of writing

 About Jane Austen:

Jane Austen was born on 16 December 1775 – left his body on 18 July 1817. She was an English novelist. Her realism, biting irony and social commentary as well as her acclaimed plots have gained her historical importance among scholars and critics. The landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature. Austen lived her entire life as part of a close-knit family located on the lower fringes of the English landed gentry. She was educated primarily by her father and older brothers as well as through her own reading.

The steadfast support of her family was critical to her development as a professional writer.  From 1811 until 1816, with the release of “Sense and Sensibility (1811)”,” Pride and Prejudice (1813)”, “Mansfield Park (1814)” and “Emma (1815)”, she achieved success as a published writer. She wrote two additional novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both published posthumously in 1818, and began a third, which was eventually titled Sanditon, but died before completing it.

Austen's works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century realism.  Her plots, though fundamentally comic, highlight the dependence of women on marriage to secure social standing and economic security. Her works, though usually popular, were first published anonymously and brought her little personal fame and only a few positive reviews during her lifetime, but the publication in 1869 of her nephew's A Memoir of Jane Austen introduced her to a wider public, and by the 1940s she had become widely accepted in academia as a great English writer. The second half of the 20th century saw a proliferation of Austen scholarship and the emergence of a Janeite fan culture.

Jane Austen’s style of writing:

Jane Austen’s discrete literary style relies on a combination of irony, parody, burlesque, free indirect speech, and a degree of realism. She uses parody and burlesque for effect of comedy and to critique the portrayal of women in 18th-century sentimental and gothic novels. Austen extends her critique by highlighting social hypocrisy through irony. She often creates an ironic tone through free indirect speech in which the thoughts, ideas and words of the characters mix with the voice of the narrator.

 The degree to which critics believe Austen's characters have psychological depth informs their views regarding her realism. While some scholars argue that Jane Austen falls into a tradition of realism because of her finely executed portrayal of individual characters and her emphasis on "the everyday", others contend that her characters lack a depth of feeling compared with earlier works, and that this, combined with Austen's polemical tone, places her outside the realist tradition.

Austen's most of the novels have often been characterized as "comedies of manners" or as "country house novels".  They also include fairy tale elements.  Austen's have little narrative or scenic description—they contain much more dialogue. Austen shapes a discrete and subtly-constructed voice for each character.

 Austen's plots are fundamentally about education; her female characters come to see themselves and their conduct more clearly, and become better, more moral people. Throughout her novels, serious reading is associated with intellectual and moral development. The extent to which Austen's novels reflect feminist themes has been extensively debated by scholars; however, most critics agree that her novels highlight how some female characters take charge of their own worlds while others are confined, physically and spiritually. Almost all of her works explore the precarious economic situation in which women of the late 18th and early 19th centuries found them. Jane Austen's novels have variously been described as politically conservative and progressive.

Jane Austen’s writing of juvenile is parodies and burlesques of popular 18th-century genres, such as the sentimental novel. She humorously demonstrates that the reversals of social convention common in sentimental novels, such as contempt for parental guidance, are ridiculously impractical; her characters "are dead to all common sense". Her interest in these comedic styles, influenced in part by the writings of novelist Frances Burney and playwrights Richard Sheridan and David Garrick, continued less overtly throughout her professional career. Jane Austen's burlesque is characterized by its mocking imitation and its exaggerated, displaced emphasis.

She ridicules the plot improbabilities and rigid conventions of the Gothic novel. However, Austen does not categorically reject the Gothic. As Austen scholar Claudia Johnson argues, Austen pokes fun at the "stock gothic machinery—storms, cabinets, curtains, manuscripts—with blithe amusement", but she takes the threat of the tyrannical father seriously. Austen uses parody and burlesque not only for comedic effect, but also, according to feminist critics, to reveal how both sentimental and Gothic novels warped the lives of women who attempted to live out the roles depicted in them.

Irony is also one of Austen's most characteristic and most discussed literary techniques.  She contrasts the plain meaning of a statement with the comic, undermining the meaning of the original to create ironic disjunctions. In her juvenile works, she relies upon satire, parody, and irony based on incongruity. Her mature novels employ irony to foreground social hypocrisy. In particular, Austen uses irony to critique the marriage market.  Perhaps the most famous example of irony in Austen is the opening line of Pride and Prejudice Austen's irony illuminates the foibles of individual characters and her society. In her later novels, in particular, she turns her irony "against the errors of law, manners and customs, in failing to recognize women as the accountable beings they are, or ought to be".

Austen is most renowned for her development of free indirect speech, a technique pioneered by 18th-century novelists Henry Fielding and Frances Burney. Austen uses it to provide summaries of conversations or to compress, dramatically or ironically, a character's speech and thoughts.  In Sense and Sensibility, Austen experiments extensively for the first time with this technique.

“Mrs. John Dashwood did not at all approve of what her husband intended to do for his sisters. To take three thousand pounds from the fortune of their dear little boy, would be impoverishing him to the most dreadful degree. She begged him to think again on the subject. How could he answer it to himself to rob his child, and his only child too, of so large a sum?”

Jane Austen represents the inner thoughts of the character and creates the illusion that the reader is entering the character's mind.  She often uses indirect speech for background characters. However, Page writes that "for Jane Austen...the supreme virtue of free indirect speech… that it offers the possibility of achieving something of the vividness of speech without the appearance for a moment of a total silencing of the authorial voice.

The extent to which Austen's novels are realistic is vigorously debated by scholars. The lack of physical description in her novels lends them an air of unreality. In Austen novels, as Page notes, there is a "conspicuous absence of words referring to physical perception, the world of shape and color and sensuous response".  Yet, Austen carefully researched the background of her novels, using almanacs and read books to accurately describe the chronology and geography of her fictional worlds.  Many scholars view this connection between the reader and character as a mark of realism.   At the time Austen was writing, the historical novels of Walter Scott and early realist novels of Maria Edgeworth had already initiated the realist tradition. Jane Austen's novels are sometimes seen as an outgrowth of these new genres.  William Galperin has argued, Austen could not have participated in nineteenth-century realism—the realism with which she later became associated—because it had not yet been fully defined. He argues Austen's novels were part of the beginning phases of realism.  Therefore instead of seeing Austen as a realist writer, he sees her as a picturesque writer on the cusp of realism. Her attention to detail, probability, and compositionality, lead him to call her the "historian of the everyday”.

 John Wiltshire argues that Austen's works may also be distinguished from the realist tradition in their treatment of illness and health. In the realist tradition, good health is taken for granted, as part of the invisible background, and characters that are ill, or injured, or deformed, become prominently visible for that reason. In Austen's works, the issue of health is in the foreground—Emma's good health, Mr. Woodhouse's hypochondria, Fanny Price's "physical insecurity."  Austen's works may also be distinguished from the realist tradition in their treatment of illness and health.

Genre is another style used by the Jane Au sten. Austen novels have often been characterized as "country house novels" or as "comedies of manners". Austen's novels can easily be situated within the 18th-century novel tradition. Austen, like the rest of her family, was a great novel reader.   She read widely within the genre, including many works considered mediocre both then and now, but tended to emphasize domestic fiction by women writers and her own novels contain many references to these works. Austen's early works are often structured around a pair of characters.  For example, Sense and Sensibility is a didactic novel based on the contrast between the beliefs and conduct of two heroines, a novel format that was particularly fashionable in the 1790s and exemplified by Edgeworth's Letters of Julia and Caroline and Elizabeth Inchbald's Nature and Art.   Because circulating libraries often used catalogues that only listed a novel's name, Austen chose titles that would have resonance for her readers; abstract comparisons like "sense and sensibility" were part of a moralistic tradition and eponymous heroine names were part of a new romantic novel tradition.  Conduct books integrated the styles and rhetoric of earlier genres, such as devotional writings, marriage manuals, recipe books, and works on household economy.

They offered their readers a description of (most often) the ideal woman while at the same time handing out practical advice. Austen's fiction built on and questioned the assumptions of this tradition, reacting against conduct book writers.  Beginning with the juvenilia, as early as Catherine or the Bower, Austen viewed this genre as thoroughly mindless and irrelevant to social realities.

Austen's conversations contain many short sentences, question and answer pairs, and rapid exchanges between characters, most memorable perhaps in the witty repartee between Elizabeth and Darcy. Austen grants each of her characters a distinctive and subtlety-constructed voice: they are carefully distinguished by their speech.  She is unable to express real feeling, since all of her emotions are mediated through empty hyperbole.  Austen uses conversations about literature in particular to establish an implicit moral frame of reference.