ENGL 102W Lecture 3: Genre in Emma
14 Nov 2017
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Like as you like it, emma is a comedy: it"s funny, and has a happy ending (with a handful of marriages that fully integrate the newlyweds into their community). However, as you may have noticed if you did the reading, emma is not a play, but a novel, a form that is generally understood to have developed over the eighteenth century. However, emma is not just any novel it is a bildungsroman. Most of the classic novels (and quite a few contemporary ones) fall into this category. For example, the harry potter series follows the same fundamental structure as a jane austen novel, although the scale and believability of the plots differ significantly. It is important to note that not all bildungsromane are comedies many feature bleak or oppressive situations and not all end happily: for example, charles dickens" great expectations or george.
