Is Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice written from a classicist, romanticis, or realist perspective?

Question

Why? What are lines from the book to prove so?

Answer 1

I'm going to disagree with these previous answers.

While Romanticism was on the rise in some quarters, it wasn't in the mind of Jane Austin.

Wordsworth's Lyric Ballads appears 1798; however it hasn't permeated the writing culture. Remember the first major novel is titled "Sense and Sensibility." Sensibility, as it was deployed in conversation, has a solid, positive connotation. "He is a man of good sense," or the opposite, "He is a man of little sense." Brandon is a man of sense. Mr. Collins is decidedly not.

Sense in this sense, sorry about the pun, comes to Austen from the works of Dr. Johnson who dies in 1784. His Rambler essays, in both style and content, are more aligned with Austen. When her dialogue is tart it is more Johnsonian than any other period writer.In the dreamy world of Romanticism, my personal experience of life is unique and is is driven by my subjectivity, not an objective moral code. Byron, Shelly, Coleridge are the high Romanticists.

Austen and her world was reserved and circumspect. Willoughby and Wickham are the Romantics and she mocks Willoughby when he trumpets Byron and "the new poets." Similarly, the characterizations of Kitty Bennett and Mary Ann Dashwood are as lesser than their sisters Elizabeth Bennett and Elinor Dashwood.

Answer 2

Hello

At the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, when Austen was living and producing her work, the romantic era was on the rise. "Pride and Prejudice" reveals this in such quotes as: “Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us." Interest in human emotions, human character traits, feelings, and the like is a feature of romanticism. Another nice, short quotation reveals the same tendency in P & P: “Angry people are not always wise.” Anger and love, passion and fear are romantic things: “We are all fools in love”, Austen wrote.

But the work shows tendencies of realism, too, and Austen has become celebrated in part because she was able to leap beyond "definitional boundaries" separating one tendency from the next. She treated everyday people in everyday circumstances, as realists did, and she even commented on the everyday and our human inability to make it precise, all too often: “I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.”

In short, P &P offers aspects of what has been called social realism, a genuine view of a society that the author knew well enough to write about accurately, and features of the romantic, the emotional, the sensitive.

Happy reading!

Answer 3

Jane Austen demonstrates a flexibility of genre in which realism and romanticism emerge.

Quotes that prove this include:

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." (realism)

“To be fond of dancing was a certain step towards falling in love.” (romanticism)