Особенности языка и стиля.

Introduction
Chapter I. Jane Austen in the search of her narrative style
1.1.Jane Austen’s literary evolution
1.2.Jane Austen and feminism development in fiction
1.3.Jane Austen’s cultural and religious background
1.4."Pride and Prejudice": unity of composition
Chapter II. "Pride and Prejudice": Analysis of stylistic devices used by Jane Austen
2.1. Lexical devices
2.1.1. Use of metaphor
2.1.2. Use of metonymy
2.1.3. Use of epithet
2.1.4. Use of hyperbole
2.1.5. Use of antithesis
2.1.6. Use of similes
2.1.7. Use of idioms
2.2.Syntactical devices
2.2.1. Use of direct speech
2.2.2. Use of uttered reported speech
2.2.3. Use of unuttered reported speech
2.2.4. Use of gap-sentence links
2.2.4. Use of rhetorical questions
Conclusion
Bibliography

Особенности языка и стиля.

She continues to focus on young heroines: the contrasting Elinor (sense and self-control) and Marianne (sensibility and impulsiveness) in Sense and Sensibility; Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice; Fanny Price in Mansfield Park; Emma in the novel that bears her name; and Anne Elliot in Persuasion. Sisters are often contrasted, and the closely worked out plots usually involve the twists and turns of emotion in the search for love, marriage, happiness and social status14.
Where other writers had used the novel to create fictional models, to give moral examples, to ridicule manners and morals, to describe real or imagined worlds and ways of life, Jane Austen's achievement was to create in each novel a fully realised and populated world, strictly limited in scope, such that the reader canobserve - without being made to judge - a group of characters whose emotions are recognisable, whose faults are human, whose traits are familiar. The 'issues' may seem small-scale, when com­pared to the wars being waged outside the limits of the village; but it is precisely the universality of the characters' preoccupations that makes these issues, and their expression, attractive in a lasting way to a great many readers.
When discussing Jane Austen's work, critics tend to speak of her deli­cacy and irony, her femininity and her lack of ambition and scope. This is to undervalue her and to prettify a group of novels which are considerably more than 'novels about the gentry and addressed to the gentry'. Neither should she be seen as 'typical' of her age: the major artist is prob­ably the least typical representative of any age. But Austen shows 'the form and pressure of the time' on a society which was undergoing many radical changes; the questions her characters face, 'anti-Jacobin' though their conclusions may be, are just as significant as the questions of social class and Irish identity examined by Maria Edgeworth, the pursuit of truth in Godwin, and the anti-aristocratic satire of Bage15. Jane Austen too criticises the 'gentry': her characters stage an 'anarchic' play in Mansfield Park (a play, incidentally, by Elizabeth Inchbald); she portrays an older order of values that is changing, at a time when the gap between the gentry and the poor is widening. Her young female characters, in search of the best prospect for marriage, end up marrying a country clergyman or a landed gentleman. Only Anne Elliot breaks with this 'Cinderella' tradition (which, for example, is the mainstay of Frances Burney's novels) by marrying a sailor. But the choices, the options, are indicative: what Jane Austen emphasises is community in microcosm, the search for order in a world beset by chaos, threatened on all sides, not only by war, or class division, but by such human fears as loneliness, uncertainty and failure.
Most writers of the Romantic period engage deeply in an ideological conflict between the past and the future. In many cases, the past wins - in Wordsworth and Scott, most notably. In her settling of plot in the future of marriage, Jane Austen is not succumbing to an ethos of the past, but is endeavouring to confront the realities of a difficult future, without taking recourse to the falsity of a comfortable happy ending.
Jane Austen and the Romantic writers of the early nineteenth century write in an English which is recognisably a modern variety. Shakespeare and Chaucer can be read but most will need to have recourse to an etymological dictionary or to an editor's footnotes to help in understanding the words and idioms which are no longer part of the contemporary language or which have meanings which are far removed from those established for the words today. The novels of Jane Austen, the writings of Peacock or Hazlitt, or the poetry of Wordsworth can normally be read without any such reference to dictionaries or special editions16.
Such a position is broadly true, but it should not deceive us into thinking that the language has not changed at all during the course of the past two hundred years. There are some subtle differences in the English used by Jane Austen when it is compared, for example, Walter Scott with the present-day language. When, on the second page of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, we read the following sentence, we might note that 'injury' (upset/hurt), 'comprehended' (included) and 'intercourse' (communication) are words with changed meanings in con­temporary English:
Mrs Price in her turn was injured and angry; and an answer which comprehended each sister in its bitterness, and bestowed such very disrespectful reflections on the pride of Sir Thomas, as Mrs Norris could not possibly keep to herself, put an end to all intercourse between them for a considerable period.
Where Jane Austen deliberately limited her area of concern, Walter Scott opened up the novel to the full panorama of revolution, dissent, rebellion and social change. Having written verse romances with great success for several years, he published his first novel only in 1814, at the very end of the Napoleonic wars when Britain was triumphant. And, equally significantly, the settings of his novels are in the past, rather than the immediate and highly troubled present17.
1.2. Jane Austen and feminism development in fiction
Recent years have seen much discussion of Jane Austen's feminism18, its nature, degree, and relation to present-day feminist concerns. Feminism is always socially and historically particular, advancing the rights and claims of women within specific historical, social, and cultural conditions. Thus if Jane Austen were considered a feminist, it would be by her participating in a feminism of her time, and not of ours. Jane was a feminist in this sense: she participated in a feminism conditioned by the circumstances of what has come to be called the Romantic period, and she did so by addressing one of the central concerns of at least the early part of that period. This was the role of women in creating and sustaining civil society in the aftermath of a political, social, and cultural cataclysm. It should be considered that the rise of "civil society" in the social theory and practice of Enlightenment and Sensibility that dominated culture and politics until the 1820s, if not longer, and especially the class-based reconstruction of civil society in the aftermath of Revolutionary cataclysm, and, no doubt, Austen's novels actively participated in this form of feminism19.
Austen's attitude toward Romantic feminism, which resulted in a number of great novels written by women (i.e. “Frankenstein” by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) or “Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855) was necessarily a critical one because of her ideological, cultural, and social commitment to the established church, the established professional middle class, and the dominant class, the landed gentry. These institutions had been strongly challenged during the Revolution debate and continued to be challenged by those aspects of Romantic culture that subsumed elements of Revolutionary critique. Thus Austen's attitude to Romantic culture and to Romantic feminism was critical in the sense of being analytical, evaluative, and selective. For one thing, her novels reject or even attack aspects of the post-Revolutionary sublation of Sensibility20. This fact helped her work survive the Romantic remasculinization of culture and literature and allowed her to be claimed, then and later, as an anti-Romantic. Her novels also avoid the post-Revolutionary feminization—through novelization and popularization—of discourses otherwise gendered "masculine," including historiography, philosophy, theology, and science. Her novels avoid formal and stylistic claims to originality and "genius," thereby rejecting an important post-Revolutionary device for aestheticizing the political. Similarly, Austen's novels offer no representations of excessive and transgressive selfhood, and they eschew temporal and spatial exoticism to insist on domestic and quotidian settings and relationships, thereby producing the effect of "realism" for which her novels became celebrated in nineteenth- and twentieth-century criticism. In fact, Austen's novels purposely look rather old-fashioned for the 1810s, like a reprise of the pre-Revolutionary novel of manners but purged of "sensibility" and reduced in social and cultural scope to accord with a post-Revolutionary aesthetic of retrenchment and consolidation (opposed to a post-Revolutionary and "romantic" aesthetic of extravagance, excess, and "gusto")21. Then there is her use of narratorial irony, a device considered antithetical both to "sentimental" and "romantic" modes and to revolutionary enthusiasm and overstatement.
Yet Austen's novels, like much post-Revolutionary women's writing, do contain elements that could be seen as feminist. They protest, however mutedly, against the social, legal, and economic injustice of male primogeniture, restriction of women's property rights, and female economic dependence. They show, however indirectly, how courtly culture trivializes and eroticizes women, leaving them with little alternative access to power but through intrigue and coquetry, and with few personal resources beyond indolence, immediate self-gratification, and self-centeredness. Austen's novels do criticize the too-active female, thereby following the line of conservative eighteenth-century conduct books for women—books reprinted in the 1790s as a counter-Revolutionary move. But they also illustrate the limits of passivity, a "female virtue"22 widely celebrated in the earlier conduct books and newly emphasized and glorified in post-Revolutionary domestic ideology.
More important, however, Austen is one of many women writers to represent an important or central role for women of the upper middle classes in a specifically post-Revolutionary model of civil society. This model is more domestic, local, and rural than public and metropolitan and comprises a dialectic and coalition of gentry and upper middle class—the class to which Austen and most of her readers belonged. Like those readers, Austen had good opportunity to become acquainted, at least indirectly, with earlier ideas of civil society. It is true that these ideas had been developed mainly in the Scottish, French, and English Nonconformist Enlightenments, which were different from and partly opposed to the established church that shaped Austen's ideology, culture, and social experience. But a "progressive" element in Anglicanism did support social, economic, and institutional modernization of a kind called for by the Enlightenments. Furthermore, in the Revolutionary aftermath, this kind of progressive Anglicanism could offer continuity with the past, suturing Revolutionary disruption while avoiding association with Enlightenment ideas of civil society, now contaminated by Revolutionary associations, and with “Anglican Evangelicalism, now aggressively pursuing embourgeoisement of church, state, and society”23. More important, ideas of civil society had become widely diffused among the gentry and professional middle class through forms of print including books and magazines, but especially novels, and particularly the novel of manners that was Austen's chosen form of fiction.
Austen's version of post-Revolutionary civil society was carefully constructed to avoid association with other versions discredited during the 1790s by association with French Revolutionary politics and the politics promoted by such groups as English Dissenters, middle- and lower-class sympathizers with the French Revolution, and Revolutionary feminists24. Accordingly, Austen's novels represent a “version of civil society residing in the domestic, local, feminized spheres, embodying a proto-Romantic English nationalism, and underwritten by central principles of Anglican theology”25. This post-Revolutionary idea of civil society is represented clearly in the novel Austen finished during the early Revolutionary aftermath. In Northanger Abbey, sold to a publisher in 1802 but not published until after Austen's death, Henry Tilney rebukes Catherine Morland for her gothic imaginings:
"Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians, Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you—Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing,- where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay every thing open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?"26
The passage presents a prescription for post-Revolutionary civil society that echoes leading counter-Revolutionary arguments still fresh from the political and cultural debates of the 1790s. It insists on the "national" character of civil society ("we are English") and argues that it is based in Christian ethics, is secured by the law, is guaranteed by social convention and surveillance ("neighbourhood of voluntary spies"), is diffused by material forms of modernization ("roads and newspapers"), is incompatible with "ideas" of other kinds of social reality, especially the "atrocities" that Revolutionary sympathizers attributed to the ancient regime in France and to courtly society in Britain, is extended locally and nationally (from "neighbourhood" to "newspapers"), and above all is constructed in cultural and social interaction of particular kinds ("social and literary intercourse")27.
The foundation of civil society in the "natural" power and position of the gentry, reinforced by the merit of the professional middle class, is illustrated more fully in Sense and Sensibility, which was probably written in its first form just at the point in the mid- 1790s when the intense and divisive Revolution debate was giving way to the search for post-Revolutionary forms of mediation. The novel uses a familiar device of didactic, moralistic fiction—the contrasting sisters—to illustrate the danger to self and society of excessive sensibility, or reliance on "instinct," feeling, or "genius" (as unique subjectivity), rather than "sense"28. The novel also uses disciplined subjectivity as the basis for properly ethical conduct, ranging from social interchange to choice of a marriage partner, in quotidian as well as permanent forms of civil society. But most readers at that time, whether when the novel was first written or when it was first published, would know that "sense" and "sensibility" were also recurring figures in the Revolution debate, as writers both for and against the Revolution evinced their sensibility, or moral and intellectual sensitivity, in order to authorize their political arguments. Like Frances Burney's Camilla (1796), written at around the same time, Sense and Sensibility declines to make overt political connections, and in any case was probably revised before being published in 181129. Characteristically, it takes terms that had had currency in the Revolution debate and deploys them exclusively at the local, domestic level of experience, thereby suggesting that this is the basic, foundational level of social experience and of a stable yet open social order. Sense and Sensibility is also post-Revolutionary in emphasizing the dangers posed to civil society by residual elements of court culture, ranging from male and female "gallantry" (Lucy Steele and Willoughby) to material selfishness (Mrs. Jennings). The closure of the novel represents, in the unions of Elinor and Edward Ferrars and Marianne and Colonel Brandon30, the confirmation and renewal of civil society based on the integration of gentry and professional middle class centered in domestic life and spreading over the country in a network as a civil society should do, countering the socially disruptive decadence and selfishness represented by most of the other characters and couples. That this network may seem a fragile security for civil society reflects the continuing crisis of national political confidence in the early 1810s.
In Pride and Prejudice an apparently stable civil society, again predominantly rural in location, is revealed to be dangerously vulnerable to disruption because of complacencies produced by that stability. Mr. Bennet's social values and practices clearly represent the best of an intellectualized or professionalized gentry, but he has been insufficiently attentive to the necessity of ensuring a stable succession of those values and practices. He has given in to courtly gallantry in choosing a merely beautiful wife, who accordingly behaves like a merely courtly woman, intriguing for her family's social advance and therefore meddling in matters beyond her intellectual and moral capacity. Mr. Bennet has also allowed his family's destiny to be overtaken by the accidents of mortality. Having produced only daughters when his estate is entailed on a male heir, his neglect of these daughters' moral and intellectual education opens the moral, political, economic, and national order that his family estate represents to disruption or subversion by other inadequate social elements. These include the courtly gallantry of Wickham, the “middle-class emulativeness and toadying” of Mr. Collins, the “nouveau-riche class sensitivity and unassertiveness”31 of Bingley and ambition and snobbery of his sister, and the courtly arrogance of Darcy and Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Significantly, the failures of these elements are repaired partly by an alliance of upper-class responsibility (in the chastened Darcy) and middle-class competence (the retired tradesman Mr. Gardiner), and partly by the tendency of the courtly and emulative to countermine themselves (this was a cliché of 1790s literary critiques of courtliness, such as the gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe32). More significant in Austen's envisioning or revisioning of civil society is the way that this alliance of virtuous gentry and meritorious bourgeoisie is motivated by a woman—Elizabeth, who is admired and then loved by Darcy, apparently because she is also the intellectual and moral child of the Gardiners. Paradoxically, it is Elizabeth's merit, or her consciousness of it, that first leads her to reject Darcy, drawing forth his self-vindication, which in turn forces her to recognize the dangerous excess of her sense of self-worth. This excess is much smaller in scale but similar in kind to that of the men of merit who pushed through the Revolution in France and called for a revolution in Britain during the 1790s, confident of their own Tightness—and "rights"—in the face of real or apparent upper-class arrogance like Darcy's.
Pride and Prejudice is not a novel of the 1790s33, however. Like its predecessor, it was first written during the 1790s, and in its rewritten and published form it still bears marks of the anxieties about the ability of the old order to survive subversion by its own weaknesses. But these anxieties were revived in the period just before and when the notoriously courtly Prince of Wales, then widely thought to support new and disruptive forces of social and political ambition, assumed the regency in 1811, as Britain also faced renewed Revolutionary challenge in the form of Napoleonic imperialism. This was just the period in which Austen was rewriting her two manuscript novels of the 1790s for publication.