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Article: Neither Northanger Abbey: The Reader Presupposes.
- Article from:
- Papers on Language & Literature
- Article date:
- September 22, 2000
- Author:
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We knew better but it was wrong to use a language that named ghosts, nothing you could touch.
And this is why we came to love the double negative --Vern Rutsula, "Words"
The prevalence of negative constructions in Jane Austen's notoriously problematic Northanger Abbey is well noted. In Terry Castle's introduction to the Oxford World Classics edition, he observes, representatively, that the novel is "fraught with negatives" (vii), that Northanger is "a site of negation" (viii), and that the novel "might be described, in a number of senses, as an experiment in negation" (x). Equally noted is the "compound" nature of many of these negatives, which of ...