Grassroots Culture In Jane Austen's Novels

This thesis explains some phenomena from a point view of grassroots culture in Jane Austen's novels. As a messenger of grassroots culture, Jane Austen has her peculiar ability to dominate rhythms and structures of her novels and makes them become classical works as famous as Shakespeare. Her six novels are published in her life:Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. She describes varied people in a small life community, which is still praised by critics till now.Grassroots culture becomes more and more popular these years. It is first brought forward in America in the 19th century and gives common people lots of opportunities to express their views through different ways. Grassroots culture, addressed in Jane Austen's novels, has five aspects:national origin, cultural signs, emotional theme, cultural communities, and social functions. Through analyses, we could see there is lots of information contained in her novels. National origin endowed the grassroots culture with variety style and features; cultural signs are the carrier of this culture; emotional themes are a special feature of Jane Austen's novels which shows a miniature rural world of Briton at that time before us; delicate description of cultural communities provides us with a whole impression of that society at the beginning of the 19th century; social functions make us see the advantage and disadvantage clearly. The remarkable advantage of Jane Austen's novels is the contradictions that are between romantic feelings and the reality. The unity and contradiction of these elements make her novels own amusing and flexible style. And two paralleled systems interweave to stimulate the stories to go on.There is the seemingly calm exterior where profound social connotations are concealed in ordinary stories of Jane Austen's novels. We can interpret the content of a lot of surprise among the materials. This is undoubtedly in line with the needs of grassroots culture. Simple language could be used to explore the goodness and the beauty of human soul of that era. The subject of grassroots writers are mainly the ordinary family life. Jane Austen lived in a rising period of the bourgeoisie in which the social life was greatly changed, but for people in rural areas, the family life changed in a slow, natural manner. Why Jane Austen got the success is that she vividly depicted these minute changes of the common lives. Jane Austen has never married, and her lively personality and the happy marriage of her parents make her novels end in the achievement of a happy marriage. Her fictions have a critique of reality, but the focus is still the kind wish for the common people, mainly the grassroots. It also represents the views longing for happiness of ordinary people in life.Grassroots culture is a macro cultural community, full of humanism atmosphere. It appeals to the basic rights of human beings:existing right and developing opportunities. Besides these aspects, it emphasizes the spiritual happiness as well as corporal happiness. The purpose of this thesis is the following:firstly find out the characteristics of grassroots culture; secondly, analyze the grassroots cultural elements in the extractive corpus of Jane Austen's novels; thirdly, study how to use these cultural elements for reference to improve quality of grassroots cultural works nowadays.