Authenticity in Northanger Abbey Essay -- Northanger Abbey

Northanger AbbeyAuthenticity In what is for Jane Austen an uncharacteristically direct intervention, the teller of Northanger Abbey remarks near the end The anxiety, which in the state of their attachment must be the portion of Henry and Catherine, and of all who loved either, as to its final event, fuck hardly extend, I fear, to the bosom of my readers, who will see in the tell-tale condensation of the pages before them, that we are all hastening together to perfect felicity. As distant as I realize this is the only overt reference Austen invariably makes to the material nature of her medium, and the relationship of that materiality to generic conventions. She might as well have said This is a romantic comedy Im piece of writing as announce that the happy-ending conclusion was foregone. In terms of reference answer -- surprise, suspense, narrative deferral -- the advantage of writing film scripts (as distinct from TV, whose audience can tell when the end is nigh simply by smell at its collective watch) is that there is no tell-tale compression of pages your viewers dont know when the end is coming. If youre writing scripts for, say, Blue Heelers, you make them forty-eight minutes desire and no mucking about, and the imminence of narrative closure is obvious to everybody. The advantage of beingness a novelist is that you can decide where you want to stop. One of the biggest differences between Austens novels and their incumbent screen versions -- two of which were written for TV -- is that Emma Thompsons screenplay for Sense and Sensibility, Nick Dears for judgement and Andrew Davies for Pride and Prejudice -- unlike all of the originals -- were circumscribed first and at long last by material constraints For the si... ...als, journalists and fans in period costumes (mostly about forty eld out, the ubiquitous crinoline doing duty as a blanket sort of historical dress-ups) arrived at the gates of the MCG in variously anachronous horse-drawn vehicles and vintage cars with Coke logos on them. But incisively how deep and wide the late twentieth centurys nostalgia for authenticity really goes, and meet how problematic and paradoxical a notion it has become in its list to make us forget history rather than remember it was present in Tasmania on the afternoon of Sunday April 28, when many of the tourists at interface Arthur mistook present reality for a harmless facsimile of a deucedly past -- one of those re-enactment things -- and began hurrying towards the gunshots, instead of away. Works CitedAusten, Jane. Northanger Abbey. Ed. Claire Grogan. New York Broadview, 2002.