Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice: A Routledge Study Guide and Sourcebook

By Robert Morrison

Book Overview

This guide takes the form of a sourcebook, combining reprinted contextual and critical documents with extensive introductory comment and annotation by the volume editor.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0415268508
• ISBN13: 9780415268509
• Release Date: January 2005
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.6" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Very Interesting So Far

I got this from the library & am loving it so far. It is a slim little volume, meant to help students kick-start papers, and the excerpts included are very short, but they have all been fascinating. The (very short) section on "early critical reception" gives an idea of the reaction at the time the novel came out, such as that the dialogue, which seems so formal to a reader in 2008, was considered a good, realistic representation of colloquial speech. There is a section on the impressions various novelists had of the book, the most humorous probably being Mark Twain, who says, "I often want to criticise Jane Austen.... Every time I read PRIDE AND PREJUDICE I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone!" The section on "modern criticism" covers 1940 to 2002. The excerpts never run more than two pages, but they all pack a punch in that short space. Just to give some examples: From Mark Schorer: "In large part, the comedy of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE arises out of a basic historic discrepancy that is not in itself comic at all, the discrepancy between aristocratic assumptions of social place that are becoming unreal and therefore seem merely boorish, and bourgeois desires for social place that are not yet quite realizable, and therefore, when they do not arouse our pity, seem merely foolish." From Mary Poovey: "Elizabeth's prejudice against Darcy is so quickly formed and so persistent because, at the first assembly, he unthinkingly confronts her with the very facts that it is most in her interest to deny." From Allan Bloom: "With [Mr. Collins] she is objective and detached, or, at most, irritated. But with Darcy she is enraged because of his hold over her, the fact that his opinion really does count. ... Her education in the novel is learning to accept her dependence. Marriage between these two savages requires the acceptance by each of slavery to the other, while each thinks that he or she ought to be the master. Elizabeth would never marry a man whom she considered her inferior, while she hates a man who considers himself her superior." The sections I have not yet read are excerpts from works by some of Austen's contemporaries (e.g. Samuel Johnson, Frances Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft) and "key passages" from the novel itself. I'm enjoying this book, but I doubt I would buy it for myself, although I will be making a few photocopies out of it. It is more of "just" a reference book, a jumping-off point to recommend other articles and books that I would like to read. However, if you know an academic-minded, ardent PRIDE & PREJUDICE fan, this would probably make a good gift.