Reading Habits in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey

"Reading Habits in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. This article focuses on the way Catherine Morland, Northanger Abbey’s heroine, is influenced and even guided by the literature she either chooses or is given to read. Her reading habits, as well as her changing typologies as a reader, influence both the development of her character and the narrative. This study also debunks the idea that Northanger Abbey is a parody of Gothic fiction, contextualizing book reading in an age when the novel was yet to be considered a respectable literary genre. Keywords: wise reader, the avid reader, the hypocritical reader, character development, narrative development, Gothic fiction, novel theory"

The Gothic

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.

Interpreting Jane Austen’s Writing Style: Adaptations of the Novel Northanger Abbey

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.