Is Jane Austen the greatest English novelist?
>>24786771Walter Scott is better.
it's ok to just talk about why you like a book, you don't need to do meaningless juvenile power rankings all the time.
Yes. She reined in all the excesses of sentimental, romantic, epistolary, and picaresque fiction that was keeping English literature to that point in a low literary standing.She brought maturity, humor, and social insight that began to make realism (the most important movement in the history of the novel) possible in England.She pioneered essential devices of modern fiction, particularly free indirect discourse.Her output was varied but highly consistent with no misses across six novels.Her work is just as popular and respected, critically and popularly, centuries later.No other English novelist can lay claim to more than two of the above, let alone all of them. Honestly, the only contender for greatest English-language novelist of all time from any country would be James Joyce.Brontes, Dickens, Eliot, all get fucking mogged by her.>>24786774Only two or three of his books have held up and his only major contributions were to historical fiction.
>>24787123>his only major contributions were to historical fiction.Ridiculous. He had an enormous influence on practically all novelists of the generation after his own.
>>24787123>Honestly, the only contender for greatest English-language novelist of all time from any country would be James JoyceLol. Rest of post discarded
>>24787126Nice try, Angus McMoaner
>>24787212No please, go on, explain why you're retarded, it'd be a real treat.
>>24787260NTA, but if you have a pair of NUTS then Scott mogs
>novelsYikesThe Romance is superior
>>24787282Dickens is by far the better storyteller and character writer and his prose is more consistent. Reading Joyce is a dreadful experience for anyone who values fiction over commentary
>>24787317Dickens' entire bibliography falls short of the heights of Joyce's "The Dead"
>>24787317>>24787362The duality of man.
>>24787123The dreadful realism almost killed the novel as a genre. Thankfully innovators like Joyce and Pynchon rescued it from its clutches.
>>24788741Genre fiction and pulp picked up where Scott left off. Books like Hereward the Wake, Vril: Power of the Coming Race, Time Machine and King Solomon's Mines rescued literature from the shitter.
>>24787362Untrue but The Dead is great
>>24786771I think she's extremely overrated and the majority of her popularity comes from simply being a female writer. It granted her this protective bubble especially in the modern day, which stops her being compared to any male writer who may and is better than her.I respect her ability to convey the feelings/thoughts of underrepresented people in her time period, but as stories they just failed to truly make me empathise with the characters or think of them as real people. The novels come across as a weak backdrop with the characters being underdeveloped vessels for holding her own opinions of society and the landed gentry at the time. As historical documents, they're arguably invaluable to historians and anthropologists and the like; as actual novels I can't say she even ranks above average when you compare her to every British or even English writer. Thomas Hardy, Brontes, Dickens, Shakespeare, Agatha Christie all wrote 'love' better than her and I'll stand by that.
Women can’t be writers
I just hope for anglo readers it isn’t so lol.Sterne is my fav personally if he counts as English.
>>24788803That is the hate ITT ultimately it is the female interests don't appeal to white male brains so she "can't" be better than dead white man 101
>>24788905he obviously doesn’t.
>>24786771Lmao
>>24786771Yes, by far
>>24788753>>24788741Go back to your containment threads for teenagers, genrefags.
I don't really like novels as a genre tbqhdesu
>>24788797>as stories they just failed to truly make me empathise with the characters or think of them as real people.Skill issue. In fact, soul issue.
>>24788797>they just failed to truly make me empathise with the characters or think of them as real peopleI can't think of a single character in all of literature that did, the artifice is always quite clear. Maybe with the exception of Poldy, and even that took several hundred pages.
>>24789548Cope Novelfag>>24787315
>>24786771>Is Jane Austen the greatest English novelist?Jane Austen was a Maroon woman and is thus the greatest English Language novelist despite being Jamaican.
>>24789563But Ulysses is transparently contrived from page 1
>>24789669Are you trying to say that the Irish are humans?
>>24789669Between Joyce’s many interleavings, we can hear a sentimental Irish tenor with a wine-dark voice, while Leopold Bloom’s Dublin is built of the Realist’s heavy bricks.
>>24789657was this revealed to you in a dream, sir?
