Reading Habits in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey

2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-190
Author(s):  
Ana Voicu

"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"

Author(s):  
Horace Walpole

‘Look, my lord! See heaven itself declares against your impious intentions’ The Castle of Otranto (1764) is the first supernatural English novel and one of the most influential works of Gothic fiction. It inaugurated a literary genre that will be forever associated with the effects that Walpole pioneered. Professing to be a translation of a mysterious Italian tale from the darkest Middle Ages, the novel tells of Manfred, prince of Otranto, whose fear of an ancient prophecy sets him on a course of destruction. After the grotesque death of his only son, Conrad, on his wedding day, Manfred determines to marry the bride–to–be. The virgin Isabella flees through a castle riddled with secret passages. Chilling coincidences, ghostly visitations, arcane revelations, and violent combat combine in a heady mix that terrified the novel's first readers. In this new edition Nick Groom examines the reasons for its extraordinary impact and the Gothic culture from which it sprang. The Castle of Otranto was a game-changer, and Walpole the writer who paved the way for modern horror exponents.


2019 ◽  
Vol X (28) ◽  
pp. 27-44
Author(s):  
Andreia-Irina Suciu ◽  
Mihaela Culea

In the context of new times, new types of writing are created in order to meet the demands and wishes of the contemporary public. Printed books make no exception especially given that the reading of (especially printed) books has declined, despite variable statistics over the years. The book reading habits have thus decreased, so making printed books attractive to readers has been a matter of concern for contemporary writers like Adam Thirlwell, as illustrated in his novella Kapow! (2012). In line with the contemporary mind-set of revolutionizing the way in which narrative is presented and the technique in which it is composed, Thirlwell plays with readers’ conceptions and expectations about literary texts, producing a highly experimental work. Along with the montage/collage technique, which will be discussed in the present paper, such concepts as ergodicity, autofiction, metatextuality, paratextuality, metamodernism or altermodernism are central to a proper understanding of how Thirlwell’s novella works and represent highlights of the exploratory undertaking of this article. Keywords: ergodic literature; metamodernism; altermodernist fiction; contemporary autofiction; revolution of the text; intra-notes; collage/montage.


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.


2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuel Aguirre

Abstract This article is part of a body of research into the conventions which govern the composition of Gothic texts. Gothic fiction resorts to formulas or formula-like constructions, but whereas in writers such as Ann Radcliffe this practice is apt to be masked by stylistic devices, it enjoys a more naked display in the–in our modern eyes–less ‘canonical’ Gothics, and it is in these that we may profitably begin an analysis. The novel selected was Peter Teuthold’s The Necromancer (1794)–a very free translation of K. F. Kahlert’s Der Geisterbanner (1792) and one of the seven Gothic novels mentioned in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. There is currently no literature on the topic of formulaic language in Gothic prose fiction. The article resorts to a modified understanding of the term ‘collocation’ as used in lexicography and corpus linguistics to identify the significant co-occurrence of two or more words in proximity. It also draws on insights from the Theory of Oral-Formulaic Composition, in particular as concerns the use of the term ‘formula’ in traditional epic poetry, though again some modifications are required by the nature of Teuthold’s text. The article differentiates between formula as a set of words which appear in invariant or near-invariant collocation more than once, and a formulaic pattern, a rather more complex, open system of collocations involving lexical and other fields. The article isolates a formulaic pattern—that gravitating around the node-word ‘horror’, a key word for the entire Gothic genre –, defines its component elements and structure within the book, and analyses its thematic importance. Key to this analysis are the concepts of overpatterning, ritualization, equivalence and visibility.


Slavic Review ◽  
1970 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 651-662 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zdzislaw Najder

The novel is the only major literary genre whose origins and development we have been able to watch in detail. It also seems to be the only genre whose development depended more on the customers than on the makers. Richardson, who wrote Pamela because he noticed how popular a continuous story in the form of letters could be; Fielding, who exploited Richardson's success in his parodistic Joseph Andrews; Scott, who produced innumerable historical romances, gamely trying to match demand with supply; Dickens, who accidentally struck a gold mine with the first chapters of The Pickwick Papers; Dostoevsky, who made extensive use of the conventions of popular, sensational novels—all are typical of the way the novel evolved. In other literary forms the discrepancy between merits and rewards, creativeness and popular expectations, and originality and response has been so frequent as to become proverbial. But this is not true of the nineteenth-century novel, where it is unusual to find a writer like Stendhal, who gained his reputation only after his death.


2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 19
Author(s):  
Urszula Terentowicz-Fotyga

<p>The paper proposes to read the dialogue of two generic traditions: the novel of manners and gothic fiction in Jane Austen’s <em>Northanger Abbey</em>. The generic dialogue in <em>Northanger Abbey</em>constitutes a particularly interesting case, as it appears at the very inception of the manorial tradition in fiction and thus bears a strong modelling function. The paper argues that <em>Northanger Abbey</em>represents a subversive version of the novel of manners, which contextualizes and substantiates the transgressive character of the gothic.</p>


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Елена Владимировна Глущенко ◽  
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.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 849-865
Author(s):  
Mihriay Musa ◽  

In this study, it was aimed to examine the reading habits levels and making the correct decision styles of basketball, handball, volleyball, and football coaches and referees in terms of some variables, the research was carried out with the general survey model, one of the quantitative research designs, the active coaches and referees of basketball, football, volleyball, and handball in İzmir, Denizli and Uşak provinces constituted the universe of the study, the sample of the study, on the other hand, consisted of 98 participants, 52 of whom were coaches and 46 were referees, determined by the simple random sampling method, one sample t-test at a 0.05 significance level was conducted to determine whether the sample represented the universe equally and homogeneously. Melbourne decision making scale I-II, and book reading habits scale were used to collect data in the study. Since the data are suitable for normal distribution, the t-test in comparing the pairwise means; parametric tests such as one-way ANOVA tests were used at 0.05 significance level in comparing the mean scores of more than two groups. In terms of education levels, it has been observed that female coaches and referees studying at faculties of sports sciences have higher levels of reading habit, love of reading, and being influenced by books. In addition, it was determined that individuals who trust and respect the decisions of their families have higher reading habits and correct decision-making styles and do not panic during the decision-making process.


2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 243-258

The essay investigates the phenomenon of laziness by first analyzing the opposition between laziness and the good. Both utility and the good make reference to labor. This opposition between labor and laziness is pivotal in Oblomov, Ivan Goncharov’s famous novel written in 1859. It marks a radical transition from a feudal paradigm to a capitalistic one. The two main characters in the novel are Ilya Ilyich Oblomov, a Russian, and Andrey Ivanovich Stolz, a German, who together seem to personify the contradiction between laziness and labor. But the purpose of the essay is to deconstruct that opposition. In this connection, one can cite Kazimir Malevich, who maintained that laziness is the Mother of Perfection and is always unconsciously inherent in the conscious intent to work. Analysis of the Latin concepts of otium and negotium indicates that the laziness/labor opposition may be deconstructed as a dialectic between labor and its opposite. In other words, laziness does not stand in contradiction to labor but is instead its inseparable dialectical other. In the last part of the essay, the article considers the thinking of Anatoly Peregud, a poet who spent almost all his life in a psychiatric hospital. According to Peregud, Lenin derived his pseudonym from the Russian linguistic root “len” (laziness) in order to make laziness central to communism. For his part, Lenin saw Oblomov as an emblem of the main obstacle standing in the way of communism.


This book continues the authoritative and established edited series of theoretical ecology books initiated by Robert May which helped pave the way for ecology to become a more robust theoretical science, encouraging the modern biologist to better understand the mathematics behind their theories. This latest instalment in the Theoretical Ecology series builds on the legacy of its predecessors with a completely new set of contributions. Rather than placing emphasis on the historical ideas in theoretical ecology, the editors have encouraged each contribution to: i) synthesize historical theoretical ideas within modern frameworks that have emerged in the last ten to twenty years (e.g., bridging population interactions to whole food webs); ii) describe novel theory that has emerged in the last twenty years from historical empirical areas (e.g., macro-ecology); and iii) cover the booming area of theoretical ecological applications (e.g., disease theory and global change theory). The result is a forward-looking synthesis that will help guide the field through a further decade of development and discovery.


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