Lta + Pp
- Submitted by: ecarnuccio
- Views: 111
- Category: English: Novels
- Date Submitted: 02/26/2016 02:16 AM
- Pages: 4
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How does a study of the intertextual connections between Pride and Prejudice and Letters to Alice enhance our understanding of societal concerns?
A text is no more than a reconditioned version of those that have preceded it, yet it is through the reconstruction of the city of invention that societal codes and constructs can be transformed. Austen’s 1813 social satire, Pride and Prejudice follows the story of Elizabeth Bennett and Mr Darcy, highlighting the issues of manners, morality, education, and marriage in the British Regency. Weldon’s 1984 epistolary text Letters to Alice contains a series of letters from Aunt Fay to her niece Alice, which try to convince her to broaden her knowledge and understanding of literature. Austen’s work tends to be witty and critical, uncharacteristic of her Romantic context. She writes with morality and rationality, void of emotional bias. She also abandons the archetypal romantic hero to explore more realistic and domesticated personalities. In doing this she gives us insight into the position of women in the regency era. Weldon is an irreverent and witty postmodernist writer. She plays with typical postmodernist form and features such as intertextuality, pastiche, didacticism and subversion. Her feminist 20th century context is reflected in her writing as she manipulates the epistolary framework to be able to assert her opinions and critique the position of women in contemporary societies. A study of the implicit and explicit intertextual connections between these texts can deepen our understanding of their respective societal concerns. We can examine this idea in light of the concept that intertextuality is the analytical deconstruction and destabilisation of social conventions. This will be shown through a close examination of the following three key ideas. The construction of female identity, the importance of moral instruction and the purpose of...
A text is no more than a reconditioned version of those that have preceded it, yet it is through the reconstruction of the city of invention that societal codes and constructs can be transformed. Austen’s 1813 social satire, Pride and Prejudice follows the story of Elizabeth Bennett and Mr Darcy, highlighting the issues of manners, morality, education, and marriage in the British Regency. Weldon’s 1984 epistolary text Letters to Alice contains a series of letters from Aunt Fay to her niece Alice, which try to convince her to broaden her knowledge and understanding of literature. Austen’s work tends to be witty and critical, uncharacteristic of her Romantic context. She writes with morality and rationality, void of emotional bias. She also abandons the archetypal romantic hero to explore more realistic and domesticated personalities. In doing this she gives us insight into the position of women in the regency era. Weldon is an irreverent and witty postmodernist writer. She plays with typical postmodernist form and features such as intertextuality, pastiche, didacticism and subversion. Her feminist 20th century context is reflected in her writing as she manipulates the epistolary framework to be able to assert her opinions and critique the position of women in contemporary societies. A study of the implicit and explicit intertextual connections between these texts can deepen our understanding of their respective societal concerns. We can examine this idea in light of the concept that intertextuality is the analytical deconstruction and destabilisation of social conventions. This will be shown through a close examination of the following three key ideas. The construction of female identity, the importance of moral instruction and the purpose of...