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Austen, Jane

Northanger abbey, Lady Susan, The Watsons and Sanditon - Oxford Oxford University Press 1998 - xlii,388p. - Oxford World's Classics .

With an introduction by Terry Castle

Northanger Abbey is about the misadventures of Catherine Morland, young, ingenuous, and mettlesome, and an indefatigable reader of gothic novels. Their romantic excess and dark overstatement feed her imagination, as tyrannical fathers and diabolical villains work their evil on forlorn heroines in isolated settings. What could be more remote from the uneventful securities of life in the midland counties of England? Yet as Austen brilliantly contrasts fiction with reality, ordinary life takes a more sinister turn, and edginess and circumspection are reaffirmed alongside comedy and literary burlesque.

Also including Austen's other short fictions, Lady Susan, The Watsons, and Sanditon, this valuable new edition examines the ambitious and innovative works with which she inaugurated as well as closed her career.

ISBN: 0192833685

Subjects--Topical Terms:
English Literature - Gothic Literature
Gothic Fiction
Manners and customs
Romance fiction, English
England
Books and reading
Horror tales--Appreciation

Dewey Class. No.: 823.7 / AUS/N