ABSTRACT
In this essay, Jodi L. Wyett demonstrates how Northanger Abbey portends the nineteenth-century novel’s obsession with history. She demonstrates how Northanger Abbey gives us insight not only into Austen’s understanding of and position in the long eighteenth-century novel marketplace, but also into her work’s enduring appeal by considering the early publication history of Northanger Abbey, surveying its critical reception, and then building upon that critical tradition to explore how the novel’s metafictionality operates. This essay explores how the parodic and metafictional qualities that initially marked the novel for dismissal for some readers are the same that reveal a rich, complex network of meaning inflected by gender and influenced by eighteenth-century satirical, Gothic, and sentimental writing.
