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Emma
Jane Austen's politics are highly contested (was she high Tory or secret radical sympathizer: see Marilyn Butler on Austen as Tory and the new book by Helena Kelly: Jane Austen: The Secret Radical...
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Emma
Jane Austen's Emma is set in the countryside around London in a small town called Highbury during Regency England. Hartfield, the house where Emma and her father live, is separated from Highbury by...
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Emma
In the first sentence of Emma, Austen says that her heroine is beautiful, smart, and wealthy and has a good personality and that she has lived her 21 years without much to disturb her. The first...
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Reference
Social structure in the novel is used to reveal Emma's pride and arrogance, and it is the central theme in her misguided matchmaking attempts. Emma experiences a change and becomes a more humble...
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Emma
There are many examples which show the themes of love and marriage in the novel Emma. Emma considers herself to be a skilled matchmaker. She seeks to make those around her happy by finding them a...
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Emma
The tone of the novel Emma is both ironic and sympathetic. There are many examples of the ironic tone in the novel. For example, Emma thinks herself to be an excellent matchmaker. She sets her eyes...
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Emma
As Chapter 18 in Jane Austen's Emma begins, readers learn that Mr. Frank Churchhill has not followed through with traveling to visit his father and stepmother, Mr. and Mrs. Weston, at their country...
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Emma
Austen portrays marriage as patriarchal in Emma, but also as an important way for women to achieve social and economic status and security. The novel opens with Mr. Woodhouse grieving the marriage...
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Emma
Although the novel's opening sentence describes Emma as "handsome, clever, and rich," the novel shows the problems that arise from her lack of a good education. Emma's mother died when Emma was...
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Emma
Jane Austen does not take the viewpoint of her heroine in the novel Emma. The novel is a comic study of point of view. The heroine, Emma, gets everything wrong. Austen tricks the reader into...
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Emma
Emma could be considered a feminist novel because it highlights the constraints faced by women in the small, fictional village of Highbury in the early 1800s. Emma, the main character, is wealthy,...
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Emma
On one level, Emma is a novel about about artistic endeavor and how we receive it. Austen lays this out in chapter 6, as Emma draws a portrait of her friend Harriet. In the comments other...
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Emma
In Emma, Jane Austen creates an entire English village, and snobbery is part of its makeup. Emma, the main character, is a snob with an acute consciousness of her own rank as daughter of one of the...
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Pride and Prejudice
There are both similarities and differences in the father-daughter relationships found in both Jane Austen's Emma and Pride and Prejudice. Since in Pride and Prejudice Elizabeth is her father's...
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Emma
There are three broad kinds of references to governesses in Emma: Miss Taylor as governess to the Woodhouses Jane Fairfax's potential position as a governess general mention of governesses applying...
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Emma
On the face of it, there seems to be very little way in which a novel that spends so much of its time poking fun at the central female character because of her belief that she is a matchmaker could...
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Emma
You might consider turning to the movie Clueless for inspiration for your modern song project; this movie is a modern day adaptation of Jane Austen's classic novel. For Mr. Knightley's discussion...
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Emma
Like Jane Austen's other social satires, Emma relies heavily on irony, especially situational irony. Listed below are examples of the novel's use of the major types of irony. 1. Situational Irony...
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Emma
You are correct when you suggest that you need to materially alter the plot to develop a different ending. The way Austen constructs her novel, there is no ending but the one she has written. There...
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Emma
Since our society is vastly different from 19th century English society, you need an external resource in order to thoroughly classify Austen's characters according to their rank. You can tell by...
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Emma
Jane Austen's Emma is, like most of her novels, a strongly-stated commentary on the social mores of the time. One of the strongest themes is that of integrity. Emma conducts herself with integrity...
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Emma
Marriage does seem to be a universal concern for Austen's characters. Marriage was of course the only way that a woman could raise herself up the social ladder and thus the person you married was...
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Emma
The explanation of Emma's remarks lies in Knightley's circumstances and inner character as well as in the immediate situation. Happily, Austen summarizes Emma's view of Knightley's circumstances...
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Emma
The strangest connection between marriage partners and social status is in that between Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill. Jane is the daughter of Miss Bates's sister, who was Mrs. Bates's younger...
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Emma
The setting in Emma is important to the novel as it represents a microcosm of society at the time. Each social class from the landed gentry (Mr Knightley) to the poor have their place. The...
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Emma
The answer to this question is both yes and no. Austen generally, in all of her novels and not just in Emma, uses the omniscient narrator to guide us through the trials and tribulations of her...
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Emma
To get a short and comprehensive summary of Emma is a bit of a trick, especially if all characters are of importance. Peripheral characters will of necessity be omitted, yet you can fill them in in...
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Emma
Central to understanding this excellent and witty novel is recognising the very different way in which marriage was though of in Austen's day. Marriage was linked inextricably to social status....
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Emma
When you ask about "form and meaning," you are asking a critical analysis question from the perspective of Formalism critical theory. Formalists (form-alists) attempted to evaluate literary texts...
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Emma
Formalism developed in Russia as a reaction to the then prevalent literary criticism that associated literature with its era's social and political realities. For example, you might think of early...
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Emma
Something that is didactic is something that intends to purposefully instruct with moral instruction. One step further, a didactic piece of literature intentionally subordinates aesthetic qualities...
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Emma
A non-didactic reading of a text is one that discounts actual or apparent moral teachings that may or may not be present by authorial intention in the narrative. Formalist critical theory is...
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Emma
The moral code that is clearly the message of this witty yet thoughtful novel points to the dangers of trusting in our instincts and imagination rather than in the facts of the situation. What...
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Emma
A didactic reading is one that draws a moral lesson from a work. A non-didactic reading of Jane Austen's Emma would be one that does not draw a moral lesson from the work. There are many types of...
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Emma
A didactic reading of Emma by Jane Austen is one which reads the novel as a work of moral instruction, drawing from the work both guidelines concerning correct ways to think and behave. It is...
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Emma
The idea of Jane Austen as a conservative--morally, as a political Tory and as part of the male literary tradition--comes from the 1975 critical publication by Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the...
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Emma
Critics who speak of Jane Austen as a liberal, in the same vein as they speak of Charlotte Brontë as a [literary] liberal, often refer to Mansfield Park for analysis, yet there are some...
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Emma
This simile comes from a fragment of a critical opinion by Twain on Austen titled "Jane Austen." A fragment is a piece that was begun by an author and, for one reason or another, never completed....
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Emma
Austen's technique for imputing two meanings to her narratorial statements through verbal irony--remember that in the text, it is the narrator we hear, not Jane Austen (although one of the charms...
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Emma
It is important to remember that part of Austen's style is the use of irony. There is a tension between the surface meaning and Austen's intended meaning. One of the key scenes which demonstrates...
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Emma
Marxist theory explores the ideas of socio-economic oppression and, its antithesis, socio-economic power from the perspective and within the framework of economic base and superstructure. In other...
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Emma
Cultural criticism is a branch of theory that takes culture and context as its defining quality. When exploring this novel through the lenses of cultural criticism, we therefore need to be aware of...
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Emma
Marxist criticism and Cultural criticism address what is not in the text, what the text hides or neglects to say. Compare this to Structural criticism that addresses what is exactly in the text:...
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Emma
Taken from the article, Bowen and Finch state, "Emma's agenda is clear: the heroine must renounce her manipulative tendencies so that the novel itself can realize its own manipulations." Just as...
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Emma
The theme of control is evident in 'Emma' implicitly and explicitly. Austen's novels take place in a strictly regimented society, where social position impacts on the opportunities and level of...
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Emma
Emma Woodhouse is a round character in Jane Austen's Emma. A round character is one who undergoes some sort of change throughout the course of a story, usually relating to their moral beliefs,...
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Emma
Jane Austen's novel Emma is written in the third person. Although the narrator is omniscient, we are generally restricted to Emma's point of view, and therefore, like Emma herself, the readers...
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Emma
Jane Austen arguably applauds self-discovery, by showing the self-discoveries of various characters in the novel. Emma's own self-discovery is that she is in fact in love with Mr Knightley, and as...
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Emma
One interesting approach to writing a sequel to Jane Austen’s Emma would be to switch points of view from that of Emma Woodhouse to that of one of the minor characters, as Jean Rhys did so...
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Emma
The Box Hill episode in Emma is the turning point in the novel for several of the characters. There is a strong tension between what the party hope to achieve and what actually happens, indicated...