Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey. Ed. Claire Grogan. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1996. ISBN: 1-55111-078-4 (paperback). Price: £9.95

1998 ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Julia Paulman Kielstra
Keyword(s):  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie-Laure MASSEI-CHAMAYOU

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.


Author(s):  
David Ehrenfeld

For two weeks now, I have wallowed in sinful luxury, rereading the six completed Jane Austen novels (especially my favorite parts), basking in the warmth and wit of her collected letters, eagerly absorbing the details of her life from her best biographies, and attentively following the arguments of her leading literary critics. I also saw the recent movie versions of Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion, falling in love with Emma Thompson and Amanda Root in quick succession, and finished off my orgy with viewings of the BBC videos of Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, and Pride and Prejudice. Throughout—at least when I could remember to pay attention—I had two questions in mind. What does Jane Austen have to say about people, communities, and nature? And what is the cause of her resurgent popularity? Perhaps, I allowed myself to think, the questions are related. Answering the questions proved not so simple, but I did have fun trying. Sam and I read Aunt Jane’s letter, dated 8 Jan. 1817, to her nine-year-old niece Cassy, beginning: . . . Ym raed Yssac I hsiw uoy a yppah wen raey. Ruoy xis snisuoc emac ereh yadretsey, dna dah hcae a eceip fo ekac . . . . . . I read the amusingly mordant comments she could write about her neighbors, such as the one in her letter of 3July 1813 to her brother Francis, mentioning the “respectable, worthy, clever, agreable Mr Tho. Leigh, who has just closed a good life at the age of 79, & must have died the possesser of one of the finest Estates in England & of more worthless Nephews and Neices [sic] than any other private Man in the United Kingdoms.” I read the last chapters of Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Persuasion each three times. I read once again about Catherine Morland’s cruel expulsion from Northanger Abbey, and about the ill-omened trip of Fanny Price, the Bertram sisters, and the Crawfords to the Rushworth estate, Sotherton, with its seductive, if too regularly planted, wilderness. And again I was privileged to accompany Emma Woodhouse, Miss Bates, Frank Churchill, and Mr. Knightly on the tension-charged picnic to Box Hill, surely one of the highest peaks in English literature.


2009 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 95
Author(s):  
Roberto Del Valle

This essay attempts a political reading of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey through its treatment of Gothic imaginaries. By working through an associative coupling of social naivety and literary sensibility, it is argued that the novel articulates a counter-model of interpersonal ethics whilst implicitly staging a criticism of hegemonic values and power relations. In this context, the notion of communitas – as developed by British anthropologist Victor Turner – offers a valuable tool for the critical examination of Austen’s text and historical conjuncture.


1970 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 343-348 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Henry Ehrenpreis

2020 ◽  
pp. 221-233
Author(s):  
Hlushchenko Olena Volodymyrivna ◽  
Kornielaieva Yevheniia Valeriivna ◽  
Moskaliuk Olena Viktorivna

The research paper focused on revealing the individual writing style of Jane Austen based on the novel Northanger Abbey and interpretations of its various adaptations. The purpose of the article is to prove that the individual author’s style can be reconstructed due to different stylistic devices that help the reader to understand the message of a literary work more profoundly and take into account in the process of film adaptations. An author’s style is characterized by numerous factors including spelling, word choices, sentence structures, punctuation, use of literary stylistic devices (irony, metaphors, rhyme, etc.) and organization of ideas, narration structure, and overall tone of the narration. The main analytic procedures used in the research are keyness, collocation, and cluster. The authors also define that the novel under analysis is a parody of Gothic fiction. The author ruined the conventions of eighteenth-century novels by making her heroine fall in love with the character before he has a serious thought of her and exposing the heroine’s romantic fears and curiosities as groundless. The article deals with adaptation as an integral part of the concept of intersemiotic translation. It is possible to say that adaptation is an attempt to translate the content of the adapted material into its screening; intersemiotic translation focuses on the analysis and interpretation of semiotic codes in the scope of adapted material. Seven basic operations used to differentiate the range of adaptation are substitution, reduction, addition, amplification, inversion, transaccentation, compression.


Author(s):  
Ashok Kumar Priydarshi ◽  

Jane Austen’s genius was not recognized either by her contemperaries or even by her successors. But about 1890 the tide of appreciation and popularity markedly turned in favour and correspondingly, against her contemporary, Sir Walter Scott. She always strives in her art to remain full conscious of her responsibility to life as an artist. She is known as the last blossom of the 18th century. She has six novels to her credit-‘Sense and Sensibility’, ‘Pride and Prejudice’, ‘Mansfield Park, ‘Emma’, ‘Northanger Abbey’ and ‘Persuasion’. Though she created her stories in her above-mentioned novels more than 200 years ago, her novels were forerunners of feminism. According to a critic, “Jane Austen was a published female novelist, who wrote under her own name, which can be seen as an important feminist quality”.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document