Jane Austen,A Transitional Writer in the English Literature.docVIP

Jane Austen,A Transitional Writer in the English Literature 【摘 要】简·奥斯汀是英国文学史上18世纪末新古典主义过渡到19世纪初浪漫主义的重要代表作家。本文重点从两方面探讨她的过渡性：一方面从作品的主题看，大部分奥斯汀的小说都反映了人们对婚姻态度及观念的变化；另一方面，从写作风格上看，她的作品以喜剧的形式讽刺社会，令人深思。 【关键词】简·奥斯；过渡时期 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 Swi