Lecture 9
The Romantic Period (III)
Ⅰ Teaching Content
Jane Austen; Pride and Prejudice
Ⅱ Time Allotment
2 periods
格陵兰岛英文Ⅲ Teaching Objectives and Requirements
1 Help the students have a good understanding of Jane Austen.
2 Help the students have a good understanding of Pride and Prejudice, especially its first chapter.
Ⅳ Key Points and Difficult Points in Teaching
1 Jane Austen
2 Pride and Prejudice
Ⅴ Teaching Methods and Means
Lecture; Discussion; Multi-media
Ⅵ Teaching Process
1 Jane Austen (1775-1817)
1.1 Bibliographical introduction
● Jane Austen was born in 1775 at Steventon, Hampshire. She was the younger daughter and the venth child of a family of eight children. Austen briefly attended boarding school in Oxford, Southampton and Reading.
● From the age of ten, her education was taken by her elder brothers and her father. Austen lived at uneventful life, passing the great part of it at her birth place and at Kent.
● Her development as a novelist was slow and painstaking. She started writing novels at about twenty, but each of them underwent revision and none was published at once.
● Of her eight novels, only four appeared in her lifetime: 李佳明简历Sen and Sensibility亲爱英文 (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), 配置英文Mansfield Park (1814) and 浇水的英文Emma (1815). Northanger Abbey and Persuasion came out after her death. And the other two novels were left unfinished. On 18 July, 1817, at the age of forty-two, she died in her sister’s arms in Winchester.
reviment1.2 Comments on Austen
● Jane Austen is a writer of the eighteenth century, though she lives in the nineteenth century England. She holds the ideal of the landlord class in politics, religion and moral principles; and her works show clearly her firm belief in the predominance of reason over passion, the n of responsibility, good manners and clear-sighted judgment. And in style, she is a neoclassicism advocator, upholding tho traditional ideas of order, reason, proportion and gracefulness in novel writing.
● Austen’s work has a very narrow literary field.
◆ The subject matter, the character range, the social tting, and plots are all restricted to the provincial life of the late 18th century England, concerning three or four landed gentry families with their routine life.
◆ With trenchant obrvation and in meticulous detail, she prents the quiet, day-to-day life of the upper-middle-class English. She is particularly preoccupied with the relationship between men and women in love.
◆ Stories of love and marriage provide the major themes in all her novels, in which all characters are always playing an active part. In their pursuit of a marriage, they are usually categorized into three types according to their different attitudes: tho who would marry for material wealth and social position, tho who would marry just for beauty and passion, and tho who would marry for true love with a consideration of the partner’s merit as well as his economical and social status. In another word, Austen tries to say that it is wrong to marry just for money or for beauty, but it is also wrong to marry without it.
●牛津高中英语 Her novels show a wealth of humor, wit and delicate satire, as can be en from her characterization of Mr. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice.
● Her style is easy and effortless, a perfect example of what De Quincey (English essayist and critic, best-known for his autobiography Confessions of an English Opium Eater《一个英国鸦片服用者的自白》。) meant when he said that we should have to turn to the pro of the cultivated gentlewoman for English uncorrupted by slang and cant of the world.
● 2014qs世界大学排名Her novels are mostly concerned with young women’s social growth and lf-discovery. Nearly all of them explore a consistent theme that maturity is achieved through the loss of illusions. To some extent, her novels belong to the tradition of Bildungsroman (a novel of growth or development, telling a story about a young person growing from innocence to experience and from immaturity to maturity).
2 Pride and Prejudice
2.1 Comment on Pride and Prejudice
● Its story is at once simple ( love and marriage) and complex (so many narrative threads loo and so many characters of widely diver personalities).
雅然培训● There is little action in this novel. It is famous for its detailed study of everyday life and its wonderful characterization.
● The portrayal of alkalinethe characters is amazingly varied and colourful.
◆ The gallery of women here is simply glittering. Mrs. Bennet is beautiful, ignorant, and snobbish. Her only business is to marry her daughters to wealthy young men. Jane Bennet is a rene, reticent beauty, Elizabeth the spirited, vocal beauty, Lydia a spoiled brat, innocent and hopeless silly and romantic, Charlotte Lucas, plain, practical, and mistress of her own life.
◆ In addition, the portraits of the men are no less noteworthy. Mr. Bennet is kind-hearted, humorous, eccentric, but a bit pedantic; Darcy’s personality is complex. Mr. Bingley is good-natured, impressionable; Mr. Collins is mediocre, a mixture of pomposity and humility; Mr. Wickham is the rake and villain of the novel.
