Satire and Humour in Jane Austen’s ‘Northanger Abbey’

2020 ◽  
Vol 04 (04) ◽  
pp. 9-11
Author(s):  
Ashok Kumar Priydarshi ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Public Interest ◽  
Gothic Novel ◽  
Northanger Abbey ◽  
Gothic Novels

Northanger Abbey’ is a commentary on as well as satire of the popular Gothic novels of Austen’s era. She was exploiting public interest in the creaky house, creaky older man and frightened virginal young heroine tropes of the era’s popular Gothic novel. As it is in one of the hardest novels of Austen, people miss its satire. Here, we get a brilliant satire on the ridiculousness of the events, settings, and emotions of gothic novels in general.

scholarly journals Gothic Infections

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (31) ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula Ryggvik Mikalsen
Keyword(s):  
Reading Habits ◽  
Gothic Novel ◽  
Northanger Abbey ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Gothic Novels ◽  
Narrative Control ◽  
Women's Reading ◽  
Selection Of

This article proposes, a reading of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818) as a case study for discussing infectious literature, storytelling as therapy and the interconnectedness of Gothic methodologies and medical humanities. Northanger Abbey was written in a period when women’s reading habits was a contested topic, so I will provide a quick historical overview of the period and the problematic Gothic novel, which Northanger Abbey satirizes. Where previous research has focused on Catherine Morland, the protagonist and ‘misreader’ in this Gothic satire, this article will focus on Austen’s feminized hero, Henry Tilney, and read him in the role of a mesmeric healer. His goal is to cure Catherine of her obsession with Gothic novels, in order for her to fulfil the feminine ideal of the time. The mesmeric method is to produce a crisis in the patient, however, I will show how Henry’s plan fails and he inadvertently produces a crisis in himself, and forces him to realize the extent of his own ‘reading illness’. He is ‘infected’ by the masculine literary canon, which in his mind entails literary superiority over Catherine and his sister Eleanor. Storytelling as therapy is a term that connects literature and trauma into a method of organizing experience. My analysis will focus on a selection of dialogue between the main characters and Henry’s monologues, to highlight where Austen’s hero is compelled to take narrative control as a way to control his own trauma; his troubled relationship with his father and the death of his mother.

Pre Press Gothic Infections

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (31) ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula Ryggvik Mikalsen
Keyword(s):  
Reading Habits ◽  
Gothic Novel ◽  
Northanger Abbey ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Gothic Novels ◽  
Narrative Control ◽  
Women's Reading ◽  
Selection Of

This article proposes, a reading of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818) as a case study for discussing infectious literature, storytelling as therapy and the interconnectedness of Gothic methodologies and medical humanities. Northanger Abbey was written in a period when women’s reading habits was a contested topic, so I will provide a quick historical overview of the period and the problematic Gothic novel, which Northanger Abbey satirizes. Where previous research has focused on Catherine Morland, the protagonist and ‘misreader’ in this Gothic satire, this article will focus on Austen’s feminized hero, Henry Tilney, and read him in the role of a mesmeric healer. His goal is to cure Catherine of her obsession with Gothic novels, in order for her to fulfil the feminine ideal of the time. The mesmeric method is to produce a crisis in the patient, however, I will show how Henry’s plan fails and he inadvertently produces a crisis in himself, and forces him to realize the extent of his own ‘reading illness’. He is ‘infected’ by the masculine literary canon, which in his mind entails literary superiority over Catherine and his sister Eleanor. Storytelling as therapy is a term that connects literature and trauma into a method of organizing experience. My analysis will focus on a selection of dialogue between the main characters and Henry’s monologues, to highlight where Austen’s hero is compelled to take narrative control as a way to control his own trauma; his troubled relationship with his father and the death of his mother.

Northanger Abbey, Lady Susan, The Watsons, Sanditon

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Austen ◽  
Claudia L. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Ordinary Life ◽  
Northanger Abbey ◽  
Gothic Novels

‘… in suspecting General Tilney of either murdering or shutting up his wife, she had scarcely sinned against his character, or magnified his cruelty.’ Northanger Abbey is about the misadventures of Catherine Morland, young, ingenuous, and mettlesome, and an indefatigable reader of gothic novels. Their romantic excess and dark overstatement feed her imagination, as tyrannical fathers and diabolical villains work their evil on forlorn heroines in isolated settings. What could be more remote from the uneventful securities of life in the midland counties of England? Yet as Austen brilliantly contrasts fiction with reality, ordinary life takes a more sinister turn, and edginess and circumspection are reaffirmed alongside comedy and literary burlesque. Also including Austen's other short fictions, Lady Susan, The Watsons, and Sanditon, this valuable new edition examines the ambitious and innovative works with which she inaugurated as well as closed her career.

The Gothic

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bill Hughes
Keyword(s):  
Reference Point ◽  
Intellectual Culture ◽  
Gothic Novel ◽  
Northanger Abbey ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Literary Heritage

This presentation considers the relationships between Gothic and Romanticism between 1764 and 1818. It locates the Gothic within the literary heritage of the Graveyard Poets and the intellectual culture of the Enlightenment. Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), the first explicitly Gothic novel, is then considered as a reference point for later Gothic stylistics. The presentation concludes by considering the close of the First Phase of Gothic in 1818, not merely through Frankenstein – which had its origins in a meeting of Romantic poets at the Villa Diodati in 1816 – but also by way of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey, which respectively satirised Gothic and Romantic sensibilities.

scholarly journals Gothic elements in contemporary detective story : Matthew Gregory Lewis and Minette Walters compared

2009 ◽  
Vol 42 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 35-43
Author(s):  
Vesna Marinko
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
Gothic Novel ◽  
Late 18Th Century ◽  
Matthew Gregory Lewis ◽  
Gothic Novels

One of the most shocking Gothic novels was written by Matthew Gregory Lewis in 1796. His Gothic novel The Monk contains all the typical Gothic elements such as a ruined castle, aggressive villain, women in distress, the atmosphere of terror and horror and a lot more. This article analyses and compares to what extent the Gothic elements of the late 18th century survived in the contemporary detective story The Ice House (1993) written by Minette Walters and how these elements have changed.

Jane Austen’s Questioning of Gender and Genres

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie-Laure MASSEI-CHAMAYOU
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Conduct Books ◽  
Northanger Abbey ◽  
Gothic Novels ◽  
Opposite View

If Jane Austen admits in her correspondence that she was eventually pleased with Thomas Gisborne’s Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (1797), the Anglican theologian nonetheless endorsed the prejudices shared by most eighteenth-century moralists towards novels. Now, in Northanger Abbey, a novel filled with literary allusions, Jane Austen’s narrator bravely takes the opposite view by launching into a bold defence of the genre. Besides resorting to a biting irony to scrutinize her society’s axioms, rules and power relations, her novels notably question Manichean representations of masculine and feminine roles. Jane Austen’s choice to distance herself from the strictly gendered models inherited from conduct books, sentimental, or gothic novels, further combines with her questioning of generic conventions. This article thus aims at exploring how Jane Austen engaged with these representations while articulating her subtle didacticism. Her aim was not merely to raise the respectability of the novel genre, but also to provide a possible answer to the crisis of values that was threatening the very foundations of the political and social order.

scholarly journals GOTHIC TRADITION IN LITERATURE FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF INTERMEDIAL ANALYSIS

2021 ◽  
pp. 43-55
Author(s):  
S. D. Titarenko ◽  
◽  
M. M. Rusanova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Visual Image ◽  
Visual Images ◽  
Medieval Art ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
Gothic Novel ◽  
Sign System ◽  
Russian Symbolism ◽  
Gothic Novels

The article is devoted to the insufficiently studied problem of using intermedial analysis for studying the Gothic tradition in the literature of Russian symbolism (on the example of V. Brusov’s and F. Sologub’s works). We focus our attention on transition a visual image or a medieval art motive from one sign system to another. We analyze how medieval cultural categories correspond to the chronotope and figurative system in the Gothic novels of the 18th - early 19th century. It is concluded that the Symbolists refer to the visual images of the Gothic novel not only as elements of tradition, but also as categories of the culture of the Middle Ages.

scholarly journals ON THE PECULIARITIES OF CHRONOTOPE IN NEW ENGLAND GOTHIC: THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE AND THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE BY SHIRLEY HARDIE JACKSON

2020 ◽  
pp. 87-92
Author(s):  
El’mira V. Vasil’yeva
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
American Literature ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Temporal Isolation ◽  
Gothic Novel ◽  
Parallel Development ◽  
Gothic Novels ◽  
The 19Th Century

The article deals with Mikhail Bakhtin’s term «the chronotope of the castle» analysed on the material of two New England Gothic novels – «The House of the Seven Gables» by Nathaniel Hawthorne and «The Haunting of Hill House» by Shirley Hardie Jackson. The author assumes that chronotope is not just a spacetime characteristic, but a set of motifs – the motive of dark past, the motif of spatial and temporal isolation, and the motif of «sentient» house. All of these motifs were used by classic Gothic novel writers of the 1760s to 1830s, and were as well employed in later quasi-Gothic texts. At the turn of the 19th century, Gothic novel commenced its parallel development in American literature, where it subsequently became one of the national genres. American writers aspired to adapt Gothic poetics to the cultural context of the country. For instance, in New England Gothic fi ction, the chronotope of the castle was transformed into the chronotope of the «bad» house. However, the set of motifs has remained the same: both Hawthorne and Jackson consistently used the motifs, provided by British Gothic fi ction, yet they further explored them and came up with their own interpretations.

scholarly journals ‘Thrilled with Chilly Horror’: A Formulaic Pattern in Gothic Fiction

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuel Aguirre
Keyword(s):  
Corpus Linguistics ◽  
Ann Radcliffe ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
Formulaic Language ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
Northanger Abbey ◽  
Key Word ◽  
Free Translation ◽  
Gothic Novels

Abstract This article is part of a body of research into the conventions which govern the composition of Gothic texts. Gothic fiction resorts to formulas or formula-like constructions, but whereas in writers such as Ann Radcliffe this practice is apt to be masked by stylistic devices, it enjoys a more naked display in the–in our modern eyes–less ‘canonical’ Gothics, and it is in these that we may profitably begin an analysis. The novel selected was Peter Teuthold’s The Necromancer (1794)–a very free translation of K. F. Kahlert’s Der Geisterbanner (1792) and one of the seven Gothic novels mentioned in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. There is currently no literature on the topic of formulaic language in Gothic prose fiction. The article resorts to a modified understanding of the term ‘collocation’ as used in lexicography and corpus linguistics to identify the significant co-occurrence of two or more words in proximity. It also draws on insights from the Theory of Oral-Formulaic Composition, in particular as concerns the use of the term ‘formula’ in traditional epic poetry, though again some modifications are required by the nature of Teuthold’s text. The article differentiates between formula as a set of words which appear in invariant or near-invariant collocation more than once, and a formulaic pattern, a rather more complex, open system of collocations involving lexical and other fields. The article isolates a formulaic pattern—that gravitating around the node-word ‘horror’, a key word for the entire Gothic genre –, defines its component elements and structure within the book, and analyses its thematic importance. Key to this analysis are the concepts of overpatterning, ritualization, equivalence and visibility.

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