Free Indirect Speech in Northanger Abbey

The thesis mainly analyzes the Free Indirect Speech in Austen’s novel Northanger Abbey (Volume 2). When Austen describes Catherine’s feeling for Henry Tilney, it is difficult for us to distinguish the subjective consciousness of the narrator from the character. Their calm and objective tone is prone to arouse the resonance with the readers. Authorial narrator sometimes appears to explain the fate of Catherine. When Austen describes Catherine’s expedition to Northanger Abbey, the character has more prominent subjective consciousness, and readers can distance themselves from the character and examine Catherine’s ridiculous and irrational behavior and feel the ironic effects. The thesis points out that Austen used this technique to portray Catherine, who was able to deal with her feeling for Henry reasonably, however, was influenced greatly by the Gothic novels at that time, and could not handle the relationship between reality and fiction very well

Aesthetics · Art · Consciousness · Epistemology · Feeling · Irrational number · Literature · Ridiculous · History · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Literary Theory and Cultural Hermeneutics · Mathematics · Philosophy · Psychology · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism · Social Psychology

• Fictions of Authority

  Susan Sniader Lanser•Fictions of Authority•2018

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