ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817) as a documentation of emerging fannish practices and modes of reading, as well as the origin of affective sensibility towards popular culture, interpreting Catherine Morland as a proto-fan(girl), and the structure of the novel itself as a derivative work of fiction. Apparently, Northanger Abbey, as a didactic tale about the dangers of popular culture represented by the novel-reading craze, follows the anti-novel discourse of the eighteenth century. However, Austen’s use of irony subverts anti-novel tropes, such as the “female Quixote.” Northanger Abbey could be understood as a great defence of popular culture in the form of novels, presenting it as a source of key social knowledge as well as entertainment.
