JANE AUSTEN’S NORTHANGER ABBEY AS A PARODY OF SENTIMENTAL AND GOTHIC NOVELS
JANE AUSTEN’S NORTHANGER ABBEY AS A PARODY OF SENTIMENTAL AND GOTHIC NOVELS

Summary/Abstract: Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey as a Parody of Sentimental and Gothic novels. Jane Austen is one of the most outstanding British literary figures of the early nineteenth-century. In my article, I attempt to interpret her first completed novel, Northanger Abbey, regarding moral-philosophical, aesthetic and literary motifs. I would like to emphasize why it is advisable to read the novel both as a Bildungsroman and as a parody of sentimental and Gothic novels. In my opinion, in Northanger Abbey, Austen shows both the similarities and differences between sentimental and Gothic novels in such a way that she wants to break out of their usual patterns. In Austen's works, the heroines need to get to know new places and people in order to re-evaluate their perspective. In addition, they must learn to face their mistakes and their consequences. What makes the heroine of Northanger Abbey even more relevant for the proposed reading is that her personality traits are apparently created by denying the characteristics of the idealized heroines of sentimental and Gothic novels. Furthermore, from the way Jane Austen closes her story, we can conclude that she rejects the conventions of Gothic and sentimental novels and makes explicit the possible psychological reading of female Gothic novels and at the same time she rewrites romantic literature and even the conventions of the female Gothic novel ending.

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