Northanger Abbey

1. Northanger Abbey Introductory Lecture: Establishing Terms

2. A Brief History of the Novel • Basic definition: an extended work of fiction written in prose • Forms of fictional narrative that precede the novel: • Greek prose romance and chivalric romance, both prose and poetry • Picaresque narrative of the sixteenth century (e.g., Don Quixote)

3. Early Narratives in English Classified as Novels Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe, 1719); still episodic in form but unified in terms of place and character motive Pamela (Samuel Richardson, 1740); considered the first psychological novel in its concern for character motivation and development and for psychological realism Tristam Shandy (Laurence Sterne, 1759); considered a sentimentalnovel, a work concerned with a protagonist’s emotional distress in an intractable social situation; sentimental novels often assert a strong moral message The Castle of Otranto (Horace Walpole, 1764); considered the first Gothic novel. These novels look backwards or away from their circumstances of composition and mobilize conventions of romance.

4. What’s real got to do with it? • Realism as a distinct literary movement arises in the mid-nineteenth century; attributes include: • attention to “everyday” subjects • representation of psychologically complex characters • representation of characters grounded in and contending with a complex social reality • rejection of romantic/gothic conventions (supernatural events, focus on aristocratic and/or archaic subjects), as well conventions of the sentimental novel (clear morality, strong emotion of characters) Nonetheless, any novel is arguably concerned with representing the real in ways that prose romances are not, even if they occur before the rise of realism.

5. How does Northanger Abbey fit in? Parody: “imitates the serious manner and characteristic features of a particular literary work, or the distinctive style of a particular author, or the typical stylistic and other features of a serious literary genre, and deflates the original by applying the imitation to a lowly or comically inappropriate subject.” Novel of Manners: we’ll develop this definition when we get to The Age of Innocence.

6. Realism, Parody, and Point of View in N.A. Point of View: “the way a story gets told – the mode (or modes) established by an author by means of which the reader is presented with the characters, dialogue, actions, setting, and events which constitute the narrative in a work of fiction.” The “I” rarely but occasionally does obtrude in what usually reads as a third-person narrative; let’s start by considering how the narrator establishes her subject and tone in the novel’s first paragraph.