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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Perceived Preceptor: Narrator's Role In Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, Jason Godfrey
Perceived Preceptor: Narrator's Role In Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, Jason Godfrey
Faculty Publications
In this article, I posit that Austen uses her self-aware, colloquial narrator to satirize Catherine’s grandiose fantasies and quiz (or mock) the reader who would prefer a story where fantasies are indulged and also to instruct the reader about the importance of discernment both in-text and in larger social discourse.
Jane Austen, The Prose Shakespeare, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner
Jane Austen, The Prose Shakespeare, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner
Faculty Publications
This essay explores the connection between Shakespearean drama and the novel’s representation of interiority. Jane Austen’s celebrated use of free indirect discourse, I argue, is linked to Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, which turned dramatic soliloquies into prose narration, rendering a character’s thought and idiom in a third-person voice. Heralded as a “prose Shakespeare” by nineteenth-century critics, Austen also developed an inverse free indirect discourse, the infusion of the narrative voice into characters’ dialogue. Scenes from Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion offer mini-Shakespearean plays of attention, for Shakespearean technique and quotation script Austen’s dramas of reading.