{"id":2405,"date":"2013-04-10T13:29:48","date_gmt":"2013-04-10T17:29:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/?p=2405"},"modified":"2013-04-10T13:29:48","modified_gmt":"2013-04-10T17:29:48","slug":"jane-austen-persuasion-vs-emma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/2013\/04\/10\/jane-austen-persuasion-vs-emma\/","title":{"rendered":"Jane Austen: &#8216;Persuasion&#8217; vs &#8216;Emma&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In view of CC202&#8217;s intellectual dabbling in Jane Austen&#8217;s works, the Core presents an article that argues <em>Emma <\/em>is in certain ways better than <em>Persuasion<\/em>. Here is an extract:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Published posthumously, it [Persuasion] has an almost skeletal feel, like an outline in which only the most salient points about each character are noted, as if Austen didn\u2019t have time to \u201ccover them with flesh.\u201d<br \/>\n&#8230;<br \/>\nI have a theory: I suspect that some readers prize\u00a0<em>Persuasion<\/em> because it is superficially more \u201cserious\u201d than Austen\u2019s other novels.<br \/>\n&#8230;<br \/>\nPerhaps these readers hold up\u00a0<em>Persuasion<\/em>, with its older, sadder protagonist,<em> <\/em>as a counterargument to the charge of frivolity.\u00a0But\u00a0<em>Persuasion<\/em> lacks not only the comic sparkle of Austen\u2019s other novels. It also lacks, relatively speaking, the fineness of observation and the psychological nuance that is enough to make any book\u2014even the fairy-tale-like love story of a teenage girl and a wealthy man\u2014a great one.<br \/>\n&#8230;<br \/>\nAdmirers make much of Austen\u2019s deadpan tone, her wit, and her irony, and rightly so. But hers isn\u2019t irony for irony\u2019s sake: Austen\u2019s portraits of people and their milieus are animated not by satirical malice or mere eagerness to entertain but by a sense of moral urgency. With a philosophical eye, she sees through fuss and finery and self-justification. She gives us a cast of characters and then zeroes in, showing us who and what is admirable, who is flawed but forgivable, who is risible and who is truly vile. Delivered economically, her judgments are not only clever but perspicacious, humane, and, for the most part, convincing. Her real subject is not the love lives of barely post-adolescent girls, but human nature and society. Austen wrote stories that show us how we think.<br \/>\n&#8230;<br \/>\nTake\u00a0<em>Emma<\/em>, in which Austen is at the height of her powers as both an artist and analyst of human beings. The novel has very few obvious signifiers of \u201cseriousness&#8221;.<br \/>\n&#8230;<br \/>\n<em>Emma<\/em> is the most perfect of Austen\u2019s novels in part because the engine of its plot doesn\u2019t run on a single moral lesson\u2014the twin evils of pride and prejudice, the desirability of being sometimes persuadable rather than invariably headstrong, the advantageousness of sense over sensibility. It preaches humility, but it does so humbly.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>For the full article, visit\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/slate.me\/YkV89S\">slate.me\/YkV89S<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In view of CC202&#8217;s intellectual dabbling in Jane Austen&#8217;s works, the Core presents an article that argues Emma is in certain ways better than Persuasion. Here is an extract: Published posthumously, it [Persuasion] has an almost skeletal feel, like an outline in which only the most salient points about each character are noted, as if [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3740,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[898,3857,2534,3856,4261],"tags":[45098,28519,37480,37484,45096,45097,45100,45099,6314,44898],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2405"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3740"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2405"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2405\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2406,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2405\/revisions\/2406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}