Through a close reading of Jane Austen’s last four completed novels, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion, the importance of character studies in literary criticism is highlighted. The paper proposes an analysis of this novel, considered illustrative for both postmodernist writing practices and the development of 'Austen cult and cultures' (Johnson 1997) at the turn of the new millennium. The flourishing of book clubbing and the reflection on the symbolic values attached to Jane Austen as an icon in the contemporary popular culture are foregrounded in Karen Joy Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club (2004), a postmodernist novel which focuses on several issues in today's American society such as gender relations, private lives, public social interactions/rituals and cultural practices or rivalry between the arts, yet all seen in relation to the reception of Austen's novels by 'everyday' American readers. Determined by the desire to engage in social practices that emulate Austenian sociability (O'Farrell 2009: 478-80), many of Jane Austen's 'everyday enthusiasts' (Wells 2011: 11) have joined reading groups/ book clubs in order to discuss her fiction and to better understand its meanings. To the present day, Jane Austen has remained a subject of almost religious adoration for her numerous fans, the Janeites, who keep returning to her writings, take interest in the films and the popular works derived from them, and even seek to surround themselves with objects that remind them of their 'beloved'.

The marriage plot