I, theorist: Accrediting the “wild imagination” of Northanger Abbey
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Nathan D. Frank
Abstract
Tracking the major narratological trends that give treatment to Jane Austen’s narrators in Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, this paper at once seeks to consolidate a narratorial voice as distinct from an authorial voice in each work while simultaneously collapsing each of these narratorial voices into storyworld characters via metalepsis. This one-two punch of consolidation and collapse allows me to argue for the emergence of a “tangled indeterminacy” in Northanger Abbey, a discovery that leads to two original possibilities: either a second narratorial voice emerges toward the end of the novel, or the initial narratorial voice bifurcates, such that a part of her is left behind in the diegesis while another part of her retreats to the narratorial plane. In either case, any attempt to attribute “the wild imagination” of Northanger Abbey to a specific narratorial persona must account for one or both of these readings.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Storyworld, transmedia storytelling, and contemporary narrative theory: An interview with Marie-Laure Ryan
- Being for every other: Levinas in the anthropocene
- Edmund Wilson, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the rhetoric of protection
- Corporeal narrative of insatiable desire in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest
- “The old boys’ network”: Medical space, gendered memory, and prejudices in Sidney Sheldon’s Nothing Last Forever
- I, theorist: Accrediting the “wild imagination” of Northanger Abbey
- Review
- Bob Fischer, ed. The routledge handbook of animal ethics. New York: Routledge, 2020. xviii+584 pp. ISBN: 9781138095069.
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Storyworld, transmedia storytelling, and contemporary narrative theory: An interview with Marie-Laure Ryan
- Being for every other: Levinas in the anthropocene
- Edmund Wilson, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the rhetoric of protection
- Corporeal narrative of insatiable desire in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest
- “The old boys’ network”: Medical space, gendered memory, and prejudices in Sidney Sheldon’s Nothing Last Forever
- I, theorist: Accrediting the “wild imagination” of Northanger Abbey
- Review
- Bob Fischer, ed. The routledge handbook of animal ethics. New York: Routledge, 2020. xviii+584 pp. ISBN: 9781138095069.
