Sarah Raff
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199760336
- eISBN:
- 9780199362257
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199760336.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Chapter 4 argues that Fanny Knight appears in Northanger Abbey both as the reader and as that ideal heroine whom the narrator declines to write about. By presenting Fanny as the “picture of ...
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Chapter 4 argues that Fanny Knight appears in Northanger Abbey both as the reader and as that ideal heroine whom the narrator declines to write about. By presenting Fanny as the “picture of perfection” Catherine Morland is not, Austen’s narrator jokingly corrects Emma’s unflattering portraits of Fanny. Meanwhile, Northanger Abbey’s narrator presents herself to a Fanny-identified reader as the seductive, quixote-making author reviled in antinovel treatises. Not only does this narrator court the reader, as critics have sometimes noticed, but she undertakes to turn her reader into a quixote, just as her hero Henry Tilney does with Catherine Morland.Less
Chapter 4 argues that Fanny Knight appears in Northanger Abbey both as the reader and as that ideal heroine whom the narrator declines to write about. By presenting Fanny as the “picture of perfection” Catherine Morland is not, Austen’s narrator jokingly corrects Emma’s unflattering portraits of Fanny. Meanwhile, Northanger Abbey’s narrator presents herself to a Fanny-identified reader as the seductive, quixote-making author reviled in antinovel treatises. Not only does this narrator court the reader, as critics have sometimes noticed, but she undertakes to turn her reader into a quixote, just as her hero Henry Tilney does with Catherine Morland.
Jacqueline Howard
- Published in print:
- 1994
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198119920
- eISBN:
- 9780191671258
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198119920.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter discusses the difference between Bakhtin's concepts of parody and stylization and indicates the relationship of parodic to other forms of dialogic utterance. It then situates and reads ...
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This chapter discusses the difference between Bakhtin's concepts of parody and stylization and indicates the relationship of parodic to other forms of dialogic utterance. It then situates and reads Eaton Stannard Barrett's burlesque, The Heroine, and Jane Austen's posthumously published Northanger Abbey as responses to Udolpho and other Gothic fiction of the 1790s. While there is little doubt for modern readers that Barrett's parodic satire of both novels and female readers tends towards monologism in its desire to suppress alternative ways of speaking and reproduce official norms, Austen's parody of Gothic conventions is dialogic, pluralizing meanings and transforming official norms. Having argued that both Radcliffe and Austen recontextualize aesthetic and other discourses in ways which question and challenge official, patriarchal codes, the chapter summarizes the discursive tensions which the situational analyses of both Udolpho and Northanger bring to light.Less
This chapter discusses the difference between Bakhtin's concepts of parody and stylization and indicates the relationship of parodic to other forms of dialogic utterance. It then situates and reads Eaton Stannard Barrett's burlesque, The Heroine, and Jane Austen's posthumously published Northanger Abbey as responses to Udolpho and other Gothic fiction of the 1790s. While there is little doubt for modern readers that Barrett's parodic satire of both novels and female readers tends towards monologism in its desire to suppress alternative ways of speaking and reproduce official norms, Austen's parody of Gothic conventions is dialogic, pluralizing meanings and transforming official norms. Having argued that both Radcliffe and Austen recontextualize aesthetic and other discourses in ways which question and challenge official, patriarchal codes, the chapter summarizes the discursive tensions which the situational analyses of both Udolpho and Northanger bring to light.
Sarah Tindal Kareem
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- December 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199689101
- eISBN:
- 9780191802027
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199689101.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature, Prose (inc. letters, diaries)
The final chapter shows how Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Shelley’s Frankenstein critique admiration for great minds. This critique occurs within the context of the emergent disciplinary war between ...
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The final chapter shows how Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Shelley’s Frankenstein critique admiration for great minds. This critique occurs within the context of the emergent disciplinary war between the arts and the sciences over who has exclusive rights to wonder. Northanger Abbey and Frankenstein refuse to equate science with disenchantment and literature with marvel. Instead, they expose arbiters of both science and taste—Victor Frankenstein and Henry Tilney—as promoters of a false realism that conceals its artifice. Embodying an alternative to this model, both novels reveal language’s capacity to manipulate perception. Manipulating narrative point of view defamiliarizes the act of reading in order to show that assuming a default skepticism, as Raspe prescribes, is insufficient. Skepticism is as open to error, Austen and Shelley suggest, as credulity. Critiquing admiration that becomes uncritical veneration for genius, Austen and Shelley re-ground wonder in the ordinary—in effect reinventing wonder yet again.Less
The final chapter shows how Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Shelley’s Frankenstein critique admiration for great minds. This critique occurs within the context of the emergent disciplinary war between the arts and the sciences over who has exclusive rights to wonder. Northanger Abbey and Frankenstein refuse to equate science with disenchantment and literature with marvel. Instead, they expose arbiters of both science and taste—Victor Frankenstein and Henry Tilney—as promoters of a false realism that conceals its artifice. Embodying an alternative to this model, both novels reveal language’s capacity to manipulate perception. Manipulating narrative point of view defamiliarizes the act of reading in order to show that assuming a default skepticism, as Raspe prescribes, is insufficient. Skepticism is as open to error, Austen and Shelley suggest, as credulity. Critiquing admiration that becomes uncritical veneration for genius, Austen and Shelley re-ground wonder in the ordinary—in effect reinventing wonder yet again.
Marilyn Butler
- Published in print:
- 1988
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198129684
- eISBN:
- 9780191671838
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198129684.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Jane Austen's original satirical inspiration was fed by dislike for a literary manner, rather than for a moral idea. The juvenilia are, according to this view, ‘burlesques’: though definition and ...
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Jane Austen's original satirical inspiration was fed by dislike for a literary manner, rather than for a moral idea. The juvenilia are, according to this view, ‘burlesques’: though definition and re-definition tends to surround the word, since it is by no means easy to see what, precisely, is being burlesqued. Although Austen's sentimentalists act in a way that is at the very least equivocal, for in practice they appear ruthlessly self-interested, it is no part of her intention to suggest that they are insincere. In her view the contradiction is inherent in the creed: she wants to show that the realization of self, an apparently idealistic goal, is in fact necessarily destructive and delusory. Dialogue of this kind is developed in Northanger Abbey, and in far subtler forms in the later novels.Less
Jane Austen's original satirical inspiration was fed by dislike for a literary manner, rather than for a moral idea. The juvenilia are, according to this view, ‘burlesques’: though definition and re-definition tends to surround the word, since it is by no means easy to see what, precisely, is being burlesqued. Although Austen's sentimentalists act in a way that is at the very least equivocal, for in practice they appear ruthlessly self-interested, it is no part of her intention to suggest that they are insincere. In her view the contradiction is inherent in the creed: she wants to show that the realization of self, an apparently idealistic goal, is in fact necessarily destructive and delusory. Dialogue of this kind is developed in Northanger Abbey, and in far subtler forms in the later novels.
Sarah Raff
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199760336
- eISBN:
- 9780199362257
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199760336.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Scholars usually envision Austen as the passive victim or beneficiary of the “Janeite” tributes that do so much to define her for the popular imagination. Raff’s claim, by contrast, is that the ...
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Scholars usually envision Austen as the passive victim or beneficiary of the “Janeite” tributes that do so much to define her for the popular imagination. Raff’s claim, by contrast, is that the phenomenon of Janeism—both the exorbitant devotion that Austen inspires in her readers and the peculiar forms this devotion often takes—is the consequence of Austen’s design. When today’s readers consult Austen-themed divination toys for advice about their romantic lives or declare themselves “in love” with Austen, they adopt a role that Austen actively prompted them to take. Raff explores the origins of this role in Austen’s experience as advisor to her niece Fanny Knight, in eighteenth-century literary debates, in the plots of Austen’s novels—including Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion—and in the generalizing discourse of Austen’s narrator and characters. In the letters dissuading Fanny from marrying one John-Pemberton Plumptre and in the novels that Austen finished or revised after writing them, Austen aligns her persona with the Pygmalion-like novelist, lover and pander-author to the reader, who was the target of popular anti-novel diatribes. Handing down to the general reader the role of quixotic Galatea that Austen’s letters had offered Fanny, the narrators of the three last-published novels make Fanny their addressee and subject matter. They promote the fantasy that, to replace the suitor who got away, Austen’s narrator can supply Fanny—and, by extension, any reader—with a new lover: either Austen’s own loving spirit or a third party conjured by Austen’s voice.Less
Scholars usually envision Austen as the passive victim or beneficiary of the “Janeite” tributes that do so much to define her for the popular imagination. Raff’s claim, by contrast, is that the phenomenon of Janeism—both the exorbitant devotion that Austen inspires in her readers and the peculiar forms this devotion often takes—is the consequence of Austen’s design. When today’s readers consult Austen-themed divination toys for advice about their romantic lives or declare themselves “in love” with Austen, they adopt a role that Austen actively prompted them to take. Raff explores the origins of this role in Austen’s experience as advisor to her niece Fanny Knight, in eighteenth-century literary debates, in the plots of Austen’s novels—including Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion—and in the generalizing discourse of Austen’s narrator and characters. In the letters dissuading Fanny from marrying one John-Pemberton Plumptre and in the novels that Austen finished or revised after writing them, Austen aligns her persona with the Pygmalion-like novelist, lover and pander-author to the reader, who was the target of popular anti-novel diatribes. Handing down to the general reader the role of quixotic Galatea that Austen’s letters had offered Fanny, the narrators of the three last-published novels make Fanny their addressee and subject matter. They promote the fantasy that, to replace the suitor who got away, Austen’s narrator can supply Fanny—and, by extension, any reader—with a new lover: either Austen’s own loving spirit or a third party conjured by Austen’s voice.
Michael Suk-Young Chwe
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691162447
- eISBN:
- 9781400851331
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691162447.003.0005
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory
This chapter analyzes Jane Austen's six novels, arguing that each is a chronicle of how a heroine learns to think strategically. For example, in Northanger Abbey, Catherine Morland must learn to make ...
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This chapter analyzes Jane Austen's six novels, arguing that each is a chronicle of how a heroine learns to think strategically. For example, in Northanger Abbey, Catherine Morland must learn to make her own independent choices in a sequence of increasingly important situations, and in Emma, Emma Woodhouse learns that pride in one's strategic skills can be just another form of cluelessness. In Pride and Prejudice, people's strategic abilities develop the least. Sense and Sensibility explores through the sisters Elinor and Marianne Dashwood how strategic thinking requires both thoughtful decision-making and fanciful speculation. The chapter also examines Persuasion and Mansfield Park. In all six novels, Austen theorizes how people, growing from childhood into adult independence, learn strategic thinking.Less
This chapter analyzes Jane Austen's six novels, arguing that each is a chronicle of how a heroine learns to think strategically. For example, in Northanger Abbey, Catherine Morland must learn to make her own independent choices in a sequence of increasingly important situations, and in Emma, Emma Woodhouse learns that pride in one's strategic skills can be just another form of cluelessness. In Pride and Prejudice, people's strategic abilities develop the least. Sense and Sensibility explores through the sisters Elinor and Marianne Dashwood how strategic thinking requires both thoughtful decision-making and fanciful speculation. The chapter also examines Persuasion and Mansfield Park. In all six novels, Austen theorizes how people, growing from childhood into adult independence, learn strategic thinking.
Christopher R. Miller
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801453694
- eISBN:
- 9780801455780
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801453694.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
This chapter considers how Jane Austen explores the uses and abuses of surprise—its sexual politics, its aesthetic dimensions, its psychic and emotional contours—in her novel Northanger Abbey. It ...
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This chapter considers how Jane Austen explores the uses and abuses of surprise—its sexual politics, its aesthetic dimensions, its psychic and emotional contours—in her novel Northanger Abbey. It argues that Austen represents emotion not only as a datum of experience but also as a medium of social expression, a rhetorical form, a theatrical performance, and a feeling to be controlled or suppressed. It also discusses Austen's assertion of a legitimate place for surprise as a locus of pleasure, both in lived experience and in narrative mediation, as well as the themes of masculinity and wish fulfillment in Northanger Abbey. Finally, it shows how Austen parodies the shock effects of gothic fiction while absorbing their perceptual syntax.Less
This chapter considers how Jane Austen explores the uses and abuses of surprise—its sexual politics, its aesthetic dimensions, its psychic and emotional contours—in her novel Northanger Abbey. It argues that Austen represents emotion not only as a datum of experience but also as a medium of social expression, a rhetorical form, a theatrical performance, and a feeling to be controlled or suppressed. It also discusses Austen's assertion of a legitimate place for surprise as a locus of pleasure, both in lived experience and in narrative mediation, as well as the themes of masculinity and wish fulfillment in Northanger Abbey. Finally, it shows how Austen parodies the shock effects of gothic fiction while absorbing their perceptual syntax.
Jacqueline Howard
- Published in print:
- 1994
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198119920
- eISBN:
- 9780191671258
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198119920.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, Criticism/Theory
This is the first full-length study of Gothic to be written from the perspective of Bakhtinian theory. The author uses Bakhtin's concepts of heteroglossia and dialogism in specific historical ...
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This is the first full-length study of Gothic to be written from the perspective of Bakhtinian theory. The author uses Bakhtin's concepts of heteroglossia and dialogism in specific historical analyses of key works of the genre. Her discussions of Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho, Matthew Lewis's The Monk, Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein demonstrate that the discursive ambiguity of these novels is not inherently subversive, but that the political force of particular discourses is contingent upon their interaction with other discourses in the reading process. This position enables the author to intervene in feminist discussions of Gothic, which have claimed it as a specifically female genre. The author suggests a way in which feminists can appropriate Bakhtin to make politically effective readings, while acknowledging that these readings do not exhaust the novels' possibilities of meaning and reception. Drawing on the most up-to-date debates in literary theory, this is a sophisticated and scholarly analysis of a genre that has consistently challenged literary criticism.Less
This is the first full-length study of Gothic to be written from the perspective of Bakhtinian theory. The author uses Bakhtin's concepts of heteroglossia and dialogism in specific historical analyses of key works of the genre. Her discussions of Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho, Matthew Lewis's The Monk, Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein demonstrate that the discursive ambiguity of these novels is not inherently subversive, but that the political force of particular discourses is contingent upon their interaction with other discourses in the reading process. This position enables the author to intervene in feminist discussions of Gothic, which have claimed it as a specifically female genre. The author suggests a way in which feminists can appropriate Bakhtin to make politically effective readings, while acknowledging that these readings do not exhaust the novels' possibilities of meaning and reception. Drawing on the most up-to-date debates in literary theory, this is a sophisticated and scholarly analysis of a genre that has consistently challenged literary criticism.
Michael Suk-Young Chwe
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691162447
- eISBN:
- 9781400851331
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691162447.003.0012
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory
This chapter examines how Jane Austen deals with cluelessness in her novels. It discusses the five explanations offered by Austen for cluelessness. The first is lack of natural ability and the second ...
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This chapter examines how Jane Austen deals with cluelessness in her novels. It discusses the five explanations offered by Austen for cluelessness. The first is lack of natural ability and the second is social distance. In the latter case, an unmarried person for example is not so good at understanding married people because he has not yet had the experience of being married. The third is excessive self-reference, using yourself too much as a template for understanding others. The fourth is status maintenance: a higher-status person is not supposed to think about the intentions of a lower-status person, and risks blurring the status distinction if she does. The fifth is that sometimes presumption, believing that one can directly manipulate another's preferences, actually works. The chapter applies these explanations to the decisive blunders of superiors such as Lady Catherine and General Tilney in Northanger Abbey.Less
This chapter examines how Jane Austen deals with cluelessness in her novels. It discusses the five explanations offered by Austen for cluelessness. The first is lack of natural ability and the second is social distance. In the latter case, an unmarried person for example is not so good at understanding married people because he has not yet had the experience of being married. The third is excessive self-reference, using yourself too much as a template for understanding others. The fourth is status maintenance: a higher-status person is not supposed to think about the intentions of a lower-status person, and risks blurring the status distinction if she does. The fifth is that sometimes presumption, believing that one can directly manipulate another's preferences, actually works. The chapter applies these explanations to the decisive blunders of superiors such as Lady Catherine and General Tilney in Northanger Abbey.
Patricia Meyer Spacks
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- October 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780300110319
- eISBN:
- 9780300128338
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300110319.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
This chapter explores the effects that were generated by the novels of the eighteenth century, and how these would later influence the likes of Sir Walter Scott, Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, and ...
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This chapter explores the effects that were generated by the novels of the eighteenth century, and how these would later influence the likes of Sir Walter Scott, Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, and Mary Shelley. It explores the roots of some of these authors in eighteenth-century fiction. Austen's Northanger Abbey, for instance, mentions Burney's Cecilia, while her the title of Pride and Prejudice is presumed to have originated from a phrase in Cecilia, which when studied closely, is a work which is also greatly concerned with the same abstractions that Austen explores. The chapter explores the roots and the links between the rich nineteenth-century fiction and the works that preceded it in the eighteenth century.Less
This chapter explores the effects that were generated by the novels of the eighteenth century, and how these would later influence the likes of Sir Walter Scott, Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, and Mary Shelley. It explores the roots of some of these authors in eighteenth-century fiction. Austen's Northanger Abbey, for instance, mentions Burney's Cecilia, while her the title of Pride and Prejudice is presumed to have originated from a phrase in Cecilia, which when studied closely, is a work which is also greatly concerned with the same abstractions that Austen explores. The chapter explores the roots and the links between the rich nineteenth-century fiction and the works that preceded it in the eighteenth century.
Cynthia Wall
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780226467665
- eISBN:
- 9780226467979
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226467979.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
The Coda underscores the argument that the printed page is three-dimensional in the sense that it has a readerly topography, with a modeled surface and a historical underground; it shares its ...
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The Coda underscores the argument that the printed page is three-dimensional in the sense that it has a readerly topography, with a modeled surface and a historical underground; it shares its textures with the textures of its world. It closes with two forms of the topographical page as art and exercise. The first showcases the recent work of Chicago web designer Nicholas Rougeux, Between the Words: Exploring the Punctuation in Literary Classics (2016). The second offers a highlighted transcription of a scene in Northanger Abbey to demonstrate ways of looking at the page as we read it--to experience, paraphrasing D. F. McKenzie, the hand-held landscape of the book.Less
The Coda underscores the argument that the printed page is three-dimensional in the sense that it has a readerly topography, with a modeled surface and a historical underground; it shares its textures with the textures of its world. It closes with two forms of the topographical page as art and exercise. The first showcases the recent work of Chicago web designer Nicholas Rougeux, Between the Words: Exploring the Punctuation in Literary Classics (2016). The second offers a highlighted transcription of a scene in Northanger Abbey to demonstrate ways of looking at the page as we read it--to experience, paraphrasing D. F. McKenzie, the hand-held landscape of the book.
