Screening Jane Austen's <i>Northanger Abbey</i>: adaptation as (mis)interpretation

Abstract

Northanger Abbey can be aesthetically defined as a metalinguistic and metafictional novel. The story of Catherine Morland, the novel’s protagonist, is inseparable from her subjective characterization as a reader of Gothic literature. As such, in order to tell her story, the narrator also parodically reflects on the very process of reading and interpreting literary conventions. This elaborate construction of double discourse – telling a story and reflecting about the artifice of its construction – provides an instigating issue for analysis when the novel gets transposed to the screen. How does the cinema respond to Austen’s innovating use of metafictional strategies? The purpose of this essay is to examine whether the potentiality of filmic language to create metafictional techniques finds resonance in this adaptation.