Styles and themes of Jane Austen plain meaning of a statement with the comic, undermining the meaning of the original to create ironic disjunctions. In her juvenile works, she relies upon satire, parody and irony based on incongruity. Her mature novels employ irony to foreground social hypocrisy. In particular Austen uses irony to critique the marriage market. Perhaps the most famous example of irony in Austen is the opening line of "Pride and Prejudice": "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." At first glance, the sentence is straightforward and plausible,
For Want of a Nail (novel) two hundred years' worth of people, places, economics, finance, technology, politics and war was spelled out. Despite being nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, the book gained little notice from Sobel's fellow historians. Alternate history was considered a subgenre of science fiction, so it was from fans of science fiction that the book gained its initial audience, and "For Want of a Nail" gained the status of a classic work of alternate history. For Want of a Nail (novel) For Want of a Nail: If Burgoyne Had Won at Saratoga is an alternate history novel published in 1973 by the American