Dramatic Structure in Jane Austen’s Novels – Michael Giffin

In this presentation, Michael describes the basic architecture of Austen’s dramatic structure, from the exuberant, offbeat, raucous comedy of her Juvenilia—which Chesterton called Rabelaisian and Dickensian—to the serious novels of her adulthood. He introduces the question: Do her novels reveal a theory of mimesis, of art imitating nature or life? Inevitably, this involves chicken-and-egg questions about how she absorbed influences and transformed them into art. Then there is the question of whether her novels became more complex as she matured as a novelist. If the dramatic structure of her novels remained the same, how is her developing literary maturity defined and measured?