Essay on Authenticity in Northanger Abbey - 1544 Words

Northanger Abbey: Authenticity In what is for Jane Austen an uncharacteristically direct intervention, the narrator of Northanger Abbey remarks near the end: The anxiety, which in the state of their attachment must be the portion of Henry and Catherine, and of all who loved either, as to its final event, can hardly extend, I fear, to the bosom of my readers, who will see in the tell-tale compression of the pages before them, that we are all hastening together to perfect felicity. As far as I know this is the only overt reference Austen ever makes to the material nature of her medium, and the relationship of that materiality to generic conventions. She might as well have said This is a romantic comedy Im writing as†¦show more content†¦In Davies adaptation of Middlemarch, a book whose opening words are Miss Brooke, the opening scene is of a sexy and mysterious-looking male stranger arriving in town: the High Plains Drifter of Victorian England. In the Davies version of Pride and Prejudice, a book about five sisters and how they secured their futures is transformed into a script which begins with two men -- one of whom is significantly more sexy and mysterious-looking than the other -- mounted on handsome, powerful, snorting horses galloping flat-out across a field. (True, the camera then pans back to find them being watched from a hill by a pair of speculative and not especially friendly dark eyes under a bonnet, and there is an audible creak of shift ing power as the view lines up with Elizabeth Bennet for the rest of the series.) Despite the relative freedom to improve on Austen that was granted by the five-hour time frame, Davies had a different if equally money-driven kind of problem; he was obliged, like the novelists writing in monthly instalments for the literary journals of the later nineteenth century, but unlike Austen herself, to rearrange the narrative so that it contained a series of regularly spaced, unresolved mini-climaxes, to leave the audience dangling andShow MoreRelatedEssay on The Gothic Genre and What it Entails6177 Words   |  25 Pageswere doing a similar thing in a very different way. Less concerned with verisimilitude they were able to convey psychological states in a way that, in retrospect, is more accurate. Early gothic tends not to have the psychological authenticity of Romantic Gothic. If someone is incarcerated for any considerable time I(such as Marchesa Mazzini in A Sicilian Romance (1790) ) they do not try to eat each other. Instead they walk our sane and with collected pietyà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦as neatRead MoreLiterature Marking Scheme9477 Words   |  38 Pagesalso in June and November 2015 ** text examined also in June and November 2015 and June and November 2016 Set texts for Paper 5 (syllabus 0486) Candidates who are taking this paper answer on one text from the following: ** Jane Austen Northanger Abbey Carol Ann Duffy The following fourteen poems: ‘Head of English’ ‘The Dolphins’ ‘Stealing’ ‘Foreign’ ‘Miles Away’ ‘Originally’ ‘In Mrs Tilscher’s Class’ ‘Who Loves You’ ‘Nostalgia’ ‘The Good Teachers’ ‘Moments of Grace’ ‘Valentine’