Emma, de Jane Austen: a produção literária de autoria feminina

Abstract

The entry of female authors into the literary world in 18th and 19th century England was arduous and full of adversities. They faced a series of difficulties that were delimited by a social system that preached male dominance in the political, social, and financial spheres: patriarchy. For this reason, Jane Austen, as well as Fanny Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Ann Radcliffe understood that it was necessary to guarantee their respective financial independence in order to claim their autonomy. In this way, this research aims at recognizing the importance of studying the literary production of female authors so as to identify their pertinent influence on the process of literary creation of the novel Emma (1815), identify the resources of irony, and discuss the themes found in the novel. In this sense, taking as a reference works that focus on analyzing the literary production of female authorship, we will take the precepts of Woolf (1948, 1990), Wollstonecraft (2016), Todd (2015), Showalter (1999), Mullan (2014), Gilbert & Gubar (2000), and Bree (2009) as starting points. This research therefore investigates how the social and cultural critique of Jane Austen's literary production context is present in the novel Emma (1815).