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Jane Austen,A Transitional Writer in the English Literature(
【摘 要】簡·奧斯汀是英國文學史上18世紀末新古典主義過渡到19世紀初浪漫主義的重要代表作家。本文重點從兩方面探討她的過渡性：一方面從作品的主題看，大部分奧斯汀的小說都反映了人們對婚姻態度及觀念的變化；另一方面，從寫作風格上看，她的作品以喜劇的形式諷刺社會，令人深思。【關鍵詞】簡·奧斯；過渡時期As we all know, it is not until the second half of the 18th century that women novelists began to appear in England. And some gifted women from the end of the 18th century to 19th century made some contributions to the development of the English novel, which even won their places in the front ranks of some realists like Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, etc. Jane Austen (1775-1817) was just such a great woman writer in this period. She brought the English novel to its maturity and her satirical fictions marked the transition from the 18th-century neoclassicism to the 19th-century romanticism in the English literature.Jane Austen was born at Steventon and the seventh child of a country clergyman family. She was educated at home and passed all her life in doing small domestic duties in the countryside. She wrote six complete famous novels, including Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), Northanger Abbey (1818), and Persuasion (1818). She lived and worked at the turn of the century, which witnessed a great change of the English society. Since the Industrial Revolution in the second half of the 18th century, the English social structure underwent rapid changes. The industrial capitalists began to control not only the economic but also the political power and thus the struggle between the workers and capitalists also became more and more sharp. Consequently, people started to doubt and even lose hope to the enlightening thoughts that was popular in the first half of the 18th century. Literature, as a “barometer” of the social life, also experienced great change. One of the most remarkable changes was in the literary taste. That is to say, people started to dislike Swift’s brutality, Defoe’s frank realism, and even Fielding’s masculine satire. So the works with the rational tone began to give way to the works full of sentiments.Under such a social and literary environment, Jane Austen exerted her transitional role in English literature. We can see it from two aspects.Firstly, in theme, most of Jane Austen’s novels reflect the process of the change of the attitude towards the marriage. As we all know, in Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility, one of the heroine, Elinor Dashwood, is quite sensible. She thinks very highly of a man whose worthiness in her eyes only increases when she learns why he cannot marry her. However, another heroine, Marianne Dashwood, is very sentimental at the beginning. So she trusts her senses and falls in love with a man who in truth is not as good as he seems and finally is abandoned. Through the different fates of these two sisters, Jane Austen shows us her early attitude towards the marriage that to marry according to sense will end in failure while with ration will succeed. Such a theme reflects that at first Jane Austen inherits the traditional enlightening thoughts. However, her minds change in her later novels, especially in her novels Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion. In these novels, sentiment becomes upper hand and attains success in the end. For example, at the very beginning of the novel Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen wrote, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”