Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen - Katrin Ristkok Burlin (essay date 1975)
Katrin Ristkok Burlin (essay date 1975)
SOURCE: '"The Pen of the Contriver': The Four Fictions of Northanger Abbey," in Jane Austen: Bicentenary Essays, edited by John Halperin, Cambridge University Press, 1975, pp. 89-111.
[In the following essay, Ristkok Burlin interprets Northanger Abbey as a "single, complex treatment of the theme of fiction."]
In Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen came to terms with her art in a single, complex treatment of the theme of fiction. Every character in this novel is implicated in the fictive process. Its heroine is a novel-reader, its hero an inveterate inventor of fictions, its villains liars, contrivers of fictions. The complicated plot is based totally on fictions, each of its major crises being precipitated by a fiction. The first crisis is obviously Catherine's discovery of the delusive nature of Gothic romances, the second crisis, her discovery of the delusive fictions of...
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