Tony Tanner > Quotes

“...one of the governing impulses in any society is, and must be, a terror of indistinctness.”
― Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression

“Jane Austen's profound concern with good manners was thus not simply a reflection of a cloistered gentility: it was a form of politics -- an involvement with a widespread attempt to save the nation by correcting, monitoring, and elevating its morals.”
― Tony Tanner, Jane Austen

“We quickly notice how very few metaphors Jane Austen uses...we can see that Jane Austen's works do seem to aim at establishing ' a single world of discourse' and that she is not at all concerned to 'join a plurality of worlds'. Such a 'plurality' could lead to a potentially uncontrollable proliferation of ambiguities and possible meanings, whereas the drive of her writing seems to aim at a 'single' sense ... Jane Austen aims at a total transparency...”
― Tony Tanner, Jane Austen

“no thans mommy i ate enough ham for one say.”
― Tony Tanner

“Thus the ideal marriage at the end of a Jane Austen novel is not simply a conventional happy ending . . . It offers itself as an emblem of the ideal union of property and propriety -- a model to be emulated, a paradigm for a more general combination of the two on which the future of her society depends.”
― Tony Tanner, Jane Austen