David Lodge, “Jane Austen’s Novels: Form and Structure” [from The Jane Austen Handbook]
In this essay, David Lodge argues that in her novels Austen combines elements of two popular eighteenth-century genres—sentimental novels and comedies of manners—while adding narrative innovations of her own, creating works of mimetic realism with complex layers of dramatic irony. Lodge goes on to employ Russian formalism in an analysis of the novels’ narrative structure, including Austen’s use of free indirect discourse and focalizing characters; such techniques, he argues, were central to Austen’s achievement of a realist mode that proved at once flexible and immersive, and which makes her books both intensely pleasurable and critically acclaimed.