"You can kind of even see that happen today with a new style of music, for example. At its peak, when that music is most popular, is also when it's most ripe for satire. And that's the kind of treatment that we see the picturesque getting during the period when Austen was writing her novels and when Doctor Syntax shows up,"
"She wasn't entirely a country mouse. She went to London, the theater and exhibitions. I think that she felt like it's her own kind of humor and felt a kindred spirit with that."
"I have so much respect for copy editors. It is way more work than I expected. It's also cool just how [much] texts change over time,"
Jane Austen wrote primarily domestic dramas yet engaged with London life, theater and exhibitions and cultivated a distinct comic sensibility. Her novels frequently allude to the picturesque and its conventions, exemplified by Marianne Dashwood's admiration of Gilpin's landscape aesthetics in Sense and Sensibility. The picturesque reached a cultural peak that made it especially vulnerable to satire, a dynamic embodied by the figure of Doctor Syntax. Doctor Syntax's satire lost prominence after the nineteenth century as the picturesque fell out of fashion. A 2023 project produced an annotated critical edition of Doctor Syntax, with students serving as designers, editors and researchers.
Read at Kqed
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