Pride and Prejudice (Routledge Guides to Literature), ,

Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813) is perhaps her most popular novel. A work of comedy, wit, romance, it is also haunted by ironic shadows and dark anxieties as Austen traces the fortunes of central character Elizabeth Bennet.
This guide takes the form of a sourcebook, combining reprinted contextual and critical documents with extensive introductory comment and annotation by the volume editor. It is divided into sections as follows:
*Contexts, which an overview of social and intellectual contexts to Austen's work with a variety of extracts from relevant documents of the time, ranging from female conduct books to political tales of terror
*interpretations, which traces the reception and academic criticism of Pride and Prejudice from the nineteenth-century to the present, in a series of readings, and also includes material on the 1995 film adaptation of the novel
*Key Passages, which reprints and offers critical commentary on fourteen widely studied passages of the novel, linking them to contextual and critical material elsewhere in the sourcebook