On Satire: Jane Austen's 'Emma'

What kind of satirist was Jane Austen? Her earliest writings follow firmly in the footsteps of Tristram Shandy in their deployment of heightened sentiment as a tool for satirising romantic novelistic conventions. But her mature fiction goes far beyond this, taking the fashion for passionate sensibility and confronting it with moneyed realism to depict a complex social satire in which characters are constantly pulled in different directions by romantic and economic forces. In this episode Clare and Colin focus on Emma as the high point of Austen’s satire of character as revealed through conversational style, and consider how the world Austen was born into, of revolutionary thought and new money, shaped the moral and material universe of all her novels. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings Read more in the LRB: Barbara Everett https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v18/n03/barbara-everett/hard-romance John Bayley https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v09/n03/john-bayley/yawning-and-screaming Marilyn Butler https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v09/n12/marilyn-butler/jane-austen-s-word-process Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford. Get in touch: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices