Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen

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Résumé :
Northanger Abbey is a novel by Jane Austen. It was published posthumously in 1817. The novel makes use of a satire on the prevailing society and mixes it with Gothic tales of terror. The main protagonist, Catherine Morland, is the daughter of a country parson, who gains worldly wisdom, first in the fashionable society of Bath and then at Northanger Abbey itself. In Abbey, she learns not to interpret the world through her reading of Gothic thrillers. Catherine's view of the world is coloured by her love of Gothic stories until she learns the value of controlling her imagination. The story of the novel thus concerns Catherine and her journey to a better understanding of herself and of the world around her. In Northanger Abbey, the narrative has two sources of conflict: internal and external. The internal conflict arises due to Catherine's own inability to distinguish fiction from reality. At the same time, the novel could also be considered Austen's critique of the gender relations and social structures of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century.

Biographie:
Jane Austen (16 December 1775 - 18 July 1817) was an English novelist. She wrote many books of romantic fiction about the gentry. Her works made her one of the most famous and beloved writers in English literature. She is one of the great masters of the English novel. Austen's works criticized sentimental novels in the late 18th century, and are part of the change to nineteenth- realism. She wrote about typical people in everyday life. This gave the English novel its first distinctly modern character. Austen's stories are often comic, but they also show how women depended on marriage for social standing and economic security. Her works are also about moral problems. Jane Austen was very modest about her own genius. She once famously described her work as the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory, on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labor. She had been working on a new novel, Sanditon, but she died before she could finish it. She is now a well known great writer.