Irony In Jane Austen's Pride And Prejudice-From The Perspective Of Speech Act Theory

This thesis is intended to make a detailed analysis of the dominant feature– irony in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice within the framework of Speech Act Theory in pragmatics.It reviews approaches to irony in both literary and linguistic fields, elaborates the connections between irony and speech act theory, presents previous literary criticism on Jane Austen's irony in Pride and Prejudice, and finally makes a case analysis of the feature in the fiction from the perspective of speech act theory.With the development of pragmatics, many of its core theories have found a successful application in literary criticism, thus emerged a new interdiscipline– Literary Pragmatics, in which speech act theory stands as a dominant theory and has a wide range of application.Irony is the most outstanding characteristic in Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice. However, in literary studies, previous scholars only focus on the author or ideological content in their critics of irony in Pride and Prejudice. Since the novelist herself invested so much time on refining her language, we have no reason to neglect her language technique in study.In view of the above, this dissertation draws on Austin and Searle's speech act theory in the case analysis of irony in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, to affirm the feasibility of applying pragmatic theories, speech act theory in particular, in literary studies.