On The Reception Process Of Sense And Sensibility From The Perspective Of Aesthetic Reception Theory

Jane Austen, as one of the pioneers in the development of modern novels, is a writer belonging to two transitional periods: from Romanticism to Realism in literary trends and from the end of the Agricultural Revolution to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in history. Her novels are the reflections on people's life and thoughts deeper than they appear to be.This thesis is composed of three chapters, in conjunction with the introduction and the conclusion. The exploration mainly concentrates on the reception differences on Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, which stem from the variations of the reader's horizon of expectation in different historical periods.Introduction provides a brief summary of Jane Austen and the literary review on her works, together with the theoretical basis about aesthetic reception theory, especially the abstract concepts which are closely related to the development of this paper.Chapter One groups the changeable appreciation process on Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility into four marked periods to present the reception tendency according to chronological sequence. This part has been developed through a number of studies and data which have been published in various English and American journals. It serves as a guide to explain the various receptions and attitudes towards Jane Austen's work.Chapter Two emphasizes on the historical clue and narrows the exploration of Jane Austen's appreciation to the cold reception, including Regency and Victorian Periods according to the whole process of cold-to-warm reception. This exploration is on the basis of the cultural and political context and also explains the reasons for the cold reaction to Sense and Sensibility. This chapter solves two major problems: one is to present what the reader's horizon of expectation is in this particular historical period; the other one is to explain the causes for the formation of the deviation between the reader's horizon of expectation and the text.Chapter Three is built on the foundation of previous chapter to analyze the warm reception and the new emerging requirements of reader's horizon of expectation and real needs in reading. Combining the thematic basis and the practical appreciation together, this part expounds that the harmonious cohesion of the horizon of modern reader's expectation brings the warm reception and appreciation around 21st century. The last part provides a brief conclusion to the whole thesis. This part also presents the central argument of the thesis: the differences of the reader's horizon of expectation in different periods lead to the cold-to-warm reception process of Sense and Sensibility.It also implies that the new readers in future are going to emerge and bring the new appreciation on the same work. Owing to the development of society, the process of appreciation is not a state of being, but a state of becoming.