Abstract
Pride and Prejudice is the British novelist Jane Austen’s representative work. The novel goes against the popular writing way and content of that time. It vividly reflects the conservative British town life and the love among people in the late eighteenth Century to early nineteenth Century.
This novel mainly talks about the love story between Darcy and Elizabeth. Their pride and prejudice made their love not so smooth. This novel developed around Darcy and Elizabeth’s love and altogether wrote four marriages, Elizabeth and Darcy, Jane and Bentley, Lydia with Wickham, Charlotte and Collins. Austen with her female sensitive and delicate observation depicted the comfortable rural life and the love and marriage of the rich and leisure class. Her superb artistic skills reflected the town scenes of everyday life of 18th century in England, which played a vital role in the history of English literature. Pride and Prejudice with its complex plot, dramatic stories, fresh language and full of witness becomes Austen’s most popular work and Austen herself loves it very much.
On the surface, this novel simply described a love story, but actually, through the use of irony Austen criticized the blind pursuit of money and status through marriage. This paper will focus on the use of irony in Pride and Prejudice. The author will analyze it by combining its writing background and some related theories of irony, such as dramatic irony and situational irony. Verbal irony mainly has an effect on the characterization and the expressing of language, dramatic irony mainly has an effect on the revealing of the author's views on marriage, and situational irony mainly has an effect on developing the story and expressing the theme.
Through the analysis of the irony art in this novel, we can know that irony in this novel is crucial in portraying characters and developing plot. This paper will help readers know more about the irony in writing. That’s also the meaning of this paper.
Key words: pride prejudice the art of irony love and marriage
Contents
Introduction 2
1. Irony 5
1.1 The Definitions of Irony 5
1.2 The Irony in Jane Austen’s works 6
2. The Art of Irony in Pride and Prejudice 7
2.1 Express the Theme 7
2.1.1 Marriage between Darcy and Elizabeth 8
2.1.2 Marriage between Jane and Mr. Bingley 8
2.1.3 Marriage between Collins and Charlotte 8
2.1.4 Marriage between Lydia and Wickham 9
2.2 Portray the Characters 9
2.2.1 Round Characters: Elizabeth as an Example 10
2.2.2 Flat Characters: Mrs.Bennet and Mr. Collins as Examples 11
2.3 Develop the Plot 12
3. The Function of Irony in Pride and Prejudice 15
Conclusion 17
Bibliography 19
