The poetics of disengagement: Jane Austen and echoic irony

Abstract

If it is a truth universally acknowledged that there is ‘irony’ in Jane Austen’s novels, there is far from general agreement as to how that irony works. Most critics hold that there is a gap between what the novels say and what they mean, but different schools of criticism interpret that gap in contrasting ways. This article assumes that such critical disagreement arises from the multiplicity of voices in Austen’s oeuvre, and more specifically, from the evaluative confusion or indeterminacy created by what Sperber and Wilson call an ‘echoic’ use of irony on the narrator’s part. This article, however, registers a dissatisfaction with Sperber and Wilson’s definition, and proposes to rewrite ‘echoic irony’ as ‘perspectival disengagement’ — a more neutral and general term capturing the narrator’s ability to subsume other characters’ voices while at the same time subtly indicating that their viewpoints are not quite his/her own.