Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Austen in her own right

I've never really been a fan of Austen because she can be rather long-winded in her descriptions. I actually felt I hated her works as an undergraduate. Perhaps it was because studying literature can inhibit the full enjoyment of it for its own sake.

Her love stories are typical romances in the modern sense though they are more civilized than modern ones which can be sexually explicit. A man and a woman meet and fall in love. They have to overcome various obstacles before coming together.

As Grace Chua in Sunday Life dated 16th July 2006 wrote, " Austen went one better by adding a... dose of satire...Her novels make fun of the society in which they are set..." This is another essential difference between her novels and modern novels of the same genre.

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