Jane Austen's hapax legomenon

[sartorias]

Three requests will usually do it, but since the beginning of the year I've had like over a dozen queries boiling down to, "Where is that thing you wrote about the difference between Austen and Heyer?" so here it is in reprise.

Comments

[whswhs]

Romance is a problematic term. I was talking a few weeks ago with rhinogirl and I referred to her novel as a "romance"-because its PoV character is a young woman, because she's attracted to a guy who's socially graceful and bad (the heir to a rival magical dynasty)-though trying to get better-while another guy is attracted to her who's rough-hewn, sarcastic, and socially lower than she is, because a lot of the plot revolves around this and its seeming resolution (not arrived at by the end of Cast into Darkness) turns on her choice of one or the other and the political issues seem peripheral to that, and because there's a very strong sense of social hierarchy as the key to male desirability. And she maintained that what she wrote was not at all a romance, because romance has a definite series of conventions that she didn't follow. I didn't follow what she said about what those conventions were well enough to restate them, but clearly there are literary things here that I'm not aware of.

The thing that I liked best about Her Majesty's Dragon

[sartorias]

Yeah . . . romance is a slippery term, but I've read books that I thought partook of the tropes and language of romance, yet the authors insisted the books were not romance.

romance

[whswhs]

from Pilgrimsoul

Since LOVE is so important a human emotion--I don't get the disdain for Romance. Doesn't this powerful feeling show humans as they really are?

Re: romance

[sartorias]

Well, there are arguments that romance DOESN'T show humans as they are, but I think that's a debate for another time.

[sartorias]

:-) Thanks!

[asakiyume]

Julia Rios also retweeted it, and wakanomori saw the tweet, so it's getting around :-)

[sartorias]

:-)

[kalimac]

Your struggle to articulate the difference between Austen and Heyer reminds me of the struggle to articulate the difference between Tolkien and Jackson. Superficial resemblances have nothing to do with it; they so profoundly differ! Yet some can't see it.

[kalimac]

When you say that "ton" meaning the upper crust of society only came into use after the Regency, exactly when do you mean? Bearing in mind that "the Regency" is itself an ambiguous term, as the Regency itself (the political regime) was pretty much after the Regency (the social period that takes its name from it), but that Austen herself covers both.

[sartorias]

Simply put, "ton" did not come to mean the "beau monde" or the elite, until the 1820s and 30s, when the actual Regency was actually over. It meant the style expressed by the haut monde.

[mamculuna]

Great discussion! I'm not a romance reader, but do love Austen. And that's exactly why. It's also why some spin-offs of Austen sometimes fall so wide of the mark. They try to take the social awareness out and keep the romance, but when that happens, there's no Austen left. On the other hand, Clueless definitely got it!

[kalimac]

I have a scholarly study of Austen movie adaptations, in which three of the contributors - apparently independently of each other - remark that Clueless has more of the Austen spirit than any of the canonical Austen adaptations.

[mamculuna]

Good to know! The Clueless world lent itself so well to that.

[whswhs]

I haven't seen Clueless, but I thought the Bollywood adaptation Bride and Prejudice was impressively true to its original.