WPC 2T ZB 0Xdp@Q@Ыdp@Q@<p9`(2Prestige Elite 12cpi (M)x@X@<p9`(2Prestige Elite 12cpiMXXN\  PXP&O Z 6Times New Roman RegularXdp@Q@<p9`(2Prestige Elite 12cpi (M)2#|d#x@X@##XN\  PXP#  . Bibliographic Essay on Jane Austen's Northanger Abbeyă Current criticism on Northanger Abbey takes as its task the establishing of coherency between the two sections of the novel, the Bath and the Northanger or Gothic sections. Earlier work on the novel found a disjunction between these two parts due to a variety of reasons: Austen's heavy handed dealing of the Gothic burlesque in the Northanger section which eclipses the treatment of the romantic in the Bath section, to the seemingly unaccountable change in Catherine's character from literal and prosaic to hyperimaginative in the respective sections. As Narelle Shaw puts it in her article, "Free Indirect Speech and Jane Austen's 1816 revision of Northanger Abbey," "a fundamental incongruity devolves around the uneasy coexistence of the novel's two sections: selfcontained Gothic burlesque is grafted unceremoniously upon sentimental comedy of manners" (Shaw, 591). Typically, critics arguing such a case situate the novel in close relation to Austen's juvenalia and chalk up its difficulties to a young and developing writer. Most recent scholarship strives to bridge this distance between the romantic and sentimental and Gothic sections and themes of the novel. The ways in which critics argue for the novel's coherency can be broken down into roughly two categories: coherency through use of genre and modes (technical and intertextual concerns) and thematic coherency. A word of caution concerning this oversimplified distinction. It is impossible to discuss thematic concerns in Northanger Abbey without dealing with intertextuality; and vice versa it is not possible to discuss modes and genre without touching on how they affect the themes of the novel. Thus, to a certain extent my placement of criticism in one or the other category could be a matter of some debate. I have placed the criticism in its particular category based on the primary focus of the critic. However, regardless of the approach, critics tend to run into the same set of questions. Issues that come up repeatedly in criticism on Northanger Abbey include: What is the object of Austen's parody? Is it the Gothic and sentimental genres? Bath society and the characters who inhabit it? Nineteenthcentury readers of Gothic and sentimental fiction? Or the reader of Northanger Abbey itself? How does the Gothic function in the novel? Does it operate to uncover the dark underside of the safe and stable England of which Henry is so staunch a supporter? Or does it function to illustrate Catherine's education in the use of common sense? What is the character of Catherine and Henry's relationship? Is it one of male oppression and dominance or, again a constructively educational one? The ways in which critics respond to these questions divides them concerning the nature of Austen's treatment of social, political, and metafictional issues. Is she radical and subversive or conservative? The tendency in the criticism is for critics finding Austen altering Gothic conventions typically find her pointing up the problematic nature of early nineteenthcentury patriarchal England. Critics arguing Austen's wholesale borrowing or parody of the Gothic tend to ignore issues of women, power and their problematic place in society. It is interesting to note that a large majority of the critics focus on the Gothic at the expense of the romantic or sentimental, regardless of where they fall concerning these issues. Is this perhaps because Catherine becomes a much more interesting character for the reader when removed from the task of being initiated into the marriage market of Bath society and begins to imaginatively explore her parameters within this setting through her experiences with Gothic fiction?  *& Biography ă Halperin, John. The Life of Jane Austen. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins   <University Press, 1984. P$ Critical Edition ă Chapman, R. W., ed. The Novels of Jane Austen: Volume V Northanger Abbey and  FPersuasion. London: Oxford UP, 1933. This edition provides a brief history of possible revision dates and publication as well as a chronology, a note on the topography of Bath, a brief comparison of sections of the novel with sections of The Mysteries of Udolpho, and an index of literary allusions, real persons and real places in the novel. `' Criticism ă Technical or intertextual concerns Citron, Jo Ann. "Running the Basepaths: Baseball and Jane Austen." Journal of xxANarrative Technique 18.3 (1988): 269277. Citron uses rule 7.08 of The Official Baseball Rules (any runner is out when he runs more than three feet away from a direct line between bases to avoided being tagged) as a metaphor for Austen's creative reworking of the traditional role of the heroine in fiction. The main point behind the metaphor is that, while playing by the rules, holding to the traditional Gothic roles of heroine, hero and villain (remaining within the confines of the three foot sweep, so to speak), Austen makes room (goes all three feet from the baseline) for an active, creative heroine that is not just a parody of, but also stands in contrast to, the traditionally passive heroine. Johnson, Claudia L. "The Juvenalia and Northanger Abbey: The Authority of Men  Fand Books." Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel. Chicago: The   <University of Chicago Press, 1988. Johnson argues that Austen uses the conventions of Gothic fiction to "familiarize the wonderful." In her usage "wonderful" refers to the excesses and larger than life events of Gothic fiction. She argues that Austen places such conventions, instilled with political meaning particularly in the wake of the French Revolution, within the realm of the ordinary and the every day to underscore the problematic nature of patriarchal authority. Wilt, Judith. "Jane Austen: The Anxieties of Common Life." Ghosts of the Gothic:  FAusten, Eliot, and Lawrence. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980. Like Citron and Johnson, Wilt sees Austen's works in general, and Northanger  FAbbey specifically, as demonstrating her creative appropriation of Gothic conventions. Similarly, Wilt sees Austen putting the Gothic to use in order "not to make romance ridiculous but to make common anxiety 'serious' or 'high'" (126). However, while Johnson focuses on how this illuminates the problematic nature of patriarchal authority, Wilt concentrates on a more thorough investigation of Austen's use of the elements of the Gothic machine, specifically how they are borrowed and transformed. Wilt's discussion includes at least a brief analysis of all of Austen's mature works, but focuses primarily on Northanger Abbey as Austen's most over borrowing from the Gothic. Hardy, John. "Catherine Moreland." Jane Austen's Heroines: Intimacy in Human  FRelationships. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984. Hardy finds a qualified abruptness between the Gothic section and Catherine's "freshness" of feeling found throughout the rest of the novel. He is in accord with a major trend in the criticism that finds Catherine's Gothic imagination as illuminating "the lie to Henry's remarks about the sane and even tenor of English life" (16). But Hardy finds that Austen writes herself into a corner ar the end of the novel. "Austen is here unable to meet the demands of her fiction except by 'fiction' of a spurious kind, and something of the amused exuberance of the earlier burlesque writer persists..." (16). Hardy also gives a good read of Catherine Moreland and points out nicely the development of intimacy between Catherine and Henry that stands in contrast to the faux intimacy between Isabella and her various beaus. Shaw, Narelle. "Free Indirect Speech and Jane Austen's 1816 Revision of   <Northanger Abbey." Studies in English Literature. 30.4 (1990): 591601. Shaw cites Austen's use of free indirect speech in Northanger Abbey as evidence that the novel underwent revision as late as 1816. Shaw backs up his thesis by tracing thematic similarities between Northanger Abbey, Persuasion (1816), and the unfinished Sanditon (1817). He does not, however, use this material to argue for the overall coherency of the novel. Rather, he state, "On this stylistic evidence, the Bath material of the novel is eclipsed in Jane Austen's consciousness by the Gothic portion, more amenable to her late creative interests" (599). Williams, Michael. "Northanger Abbey: Some Problems of Engagement." Jane xxAAusten: six novels and their methods. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 71986.  Williams enters the fray over the novel's coherency asserting it is precisely its diversity that holds it together. He finds the novel's scope of literary borrowings, parodies, and satires extends well beyond the Gothic. He finds a similar complexity of themes working along a continuum from metafictional concerns to issues of education focused on "preparing for and coping with the exigencies and the commonplaces of everyday life" (13). Williams argues that the combination and interplay between the various themes and strategies works to an ultimately unresolvable expression of the "moral or psychological or social development that Catherine's progress could be said to demonstrate" (30). Payne, Susan. "The author in the text: parodic strategy and metafiction in Jane xxAAusten's Northanger Abbey." The Strange within the Real: The Function of   <Fantasy in Austen, Bronte, and Eliot. Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1992. Perhaps the closest exploration of Austen's parodic strategy, Payne provides a clear delineation of Austen's subtle use of parody as it functions to distinguish the naive and model reader both of Gothic fiction and of the fiction of Northanger Abbey itself. Thematic concerns Morgan, Susan. "Guessing for Ourselves in Northanger Abbey." In the Meantime:  FCharacter and Perception in Jane Austen's Fiction. Chicago: The University xxAof Chicago Press, 1980. Morgan argues that in Northanger Abbey Austen presents a "new idea of fiction, specifically a new idea of character, one closer to the ideas of romantic poets than of previous novelists" (52). She sees the novel as concerned with Catherine's development away from formulaic methods for interpreting other characters to that of her own subjective understanding, which necessitates imagination as well as perception. Morgan interprets Austen's use of sentimental and Gothic conventions as a means for depicting the order of these fictional representations in contrast to the disorder of real life. She states, "[Austen's] point is precisely that life is not like novels of terror [and romance] not because life is orderly but because novel of terror [and romance] are" (68). In the midst of this disorder, Morgan finds Catherine's education at the hands of Henry Tilney the didactic principle of the novel. She sees Catherine as initially wishing to find other people understandable by such formulaic principles as external appearance equals reality or by the Gothic and sentimental formulas found in her readings; with Henry educating her to the fact that the "moral imagination," or breaking beyond the boundaries of the self through empathy, is necessary in successfully navigating oneself through the social world. Morgan's reading is problematic for two reason. First, she doesn't problematize the power structure of Catherine and Henry's relationship. She sees Henry not as a controlling suitor, but as one who enables Catherine to develop her own point of view. Second, Morgan doesn't tackle the ways in which the Gothic enable Catherine to see the dark underside of midland England of which Henry's perceptive powers fail to account. Fergus, Jan. "Northanger Abbey." Jane Austen and the Didactic Novel. Totowa:  FBarnes and Noble Books, 1983. Fergus sees Northanger Abbey as Austen's earliest novel and as such argues it is lacking "a moral dimension to the mastery of social convention" evident in her later works (15). She argues that Austen is, however, doing more than just a burlesque of the conventions of the sentimental and Gothic novel. Austen applies a pattern of "comic development succeeded by a gothic [or sentimental] climax and [then followed by] a comic climax" in order to produce a work that "insists on pointing up, and treating comically, the incongruities between literature and life, and the tendencies of novel to imitate each other rather than life" (11). In this respect, Fergus reads Northanger Abbey as "a novel about writing novels, even an 'antinovel'" (11). Weiss, Fredric. "The Era of Gothic Parody." The Antic Spectre: Satire in Early xxAGothic Novels. New York: Arno Press, 1980. A dissertation turned book with a short section on Northanger Abbey. A quick read and worth the time. Wiess parts from the current trend that finds Catherine truly a mature and insightful heroine by the end of the novel. Instead he sees Catherine, representative of the "archetypal Gothic reader" (198), as the focus of Austen's humor. Weiss argues that, rather than the Gothic genre as object of parody, she is instead borrowing from Radcliffe in a serious fashion, calling it "a tribute to Udolpho" (200). He sees Austen using a theme surprisingly similar to Radcliffe's in the object of her wit being "taste and manners and the cult of sensibility" (200). In other words, both Austen and Radcliffe "employ didactic irony to admonish their readers [through the character of Catherine in Austen's case] against the pratfalls (sic) of overwrought sensibility" (202). Pittock, Joan H. "The Novelist in Search of a Fiction: Northanger Abbey." xxAEtudes Anglaises 2 (1987): 142153. Pittock finds Austen primarily concerned with the play between imagination and good sense, with Catherine's progression towards loyalty to the latter the main didactic purpose of the novel. She responds to critics (Wilt primarily) who argue that Austen's use of the Gothic exposes the more mundane but no less serious horrors of typical early nineteenthcentury English society. Pittock ultimately finds Austen conservative, grouping her with Edmund Burke in their "resis[tance to] the excitements and disorders of revolutionary times" expressed in "terms of a sanity earned from experience by a balanced normal intelligenceby Johnson's won kind of common sense" (152). Mooneyham, Laura G. "Northanger Abbey: an Escape from Fictions?" Romance,  FLanguage and Education in Jane Austen's Novels. London: Macmillan Press, xxA1988. Mooneyham delineates Catherine's education throughout the novel, claiming, "her education can be loosely divided into two periods, the period at Bath in which she learns that what people say is not necessarily what they mean, and the period at Northanger in which she learns that the written word is equally suspect" (14). She presents a rather simplistic reading of the novel, never problematizing Henry's role as educator and at times misreading the novel. She claims that Catherine's experiences with Gothic fiction have only caused her misjudgment of characters, including General Tilney. This reading is in contrast to the majority of critics who argue that Catherine's use of Gothic fiction helps her to accurately read the General. Morrison, Paul. "Enclosed in Openness: Northanger Abbey and the Domestic xxACarceral." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 33.1 (1991): 123. Morrison discusses Northanger Abbey in terms of Foucault's concept of the panoptic in order to demonstrate the conflation of Gothic incarceration with the structures of surveillance that enclose women within a domestic prison. He states, "Catherine does function with an economy of visibility, in which even the most mundane mechanisms of culture and power [the 'roads and newspapers that lay everything open'] serve the interests of a generalized visibility" (10). This visibility, argues Morrison, is wielded by patriarchal power and functions to turn the female writing subject into "an object of male scrutiny, as a character to be read and not as a subject who reads" (14). Morrison ultimately finds Austen reacting against this system by laying bare its machinery which by definition seeks to hide itself as, not a construction of political import, but rather as "natural" and ahistorical. Morrison also uses Freud's concept of the unheimlich, or the uncanny, early in the essay to explore the relationship between the Gothic and the civilized world of Henry. In this configuration, the Gothic (the dark and mysterious) is feminine and the rational world of Henry's England is masculine. Similarly, this traditional gender construction places the feminine as the repressed and primitive and the masculine as the conscious and civilized. Morrison leaves this problematic configuration unquestioned throughout the essay even while he upholds it as a more faithful representation of the realities of everyday English life. Loveridge, Mark. "Northanger Abbey; or, Nature and Probability." NineteenthxxACentury Literature 56.1 (1991): 129. Loveridge discusses the novel in terms of the literary and historical uses of the terms nature and probability. In her use of these concepts Loveridge finds Austen's work "highly suggestive of changes in novelistic techniques that were taking place between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries" (2), as well as responding to historical events and philosophical themes. #dp@Q@#