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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.