An Unusual Case: Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey in Maoist China

Sun S.

This article examines the changing nature of Austen's reception in China since the 1950s, in particular the growth of feminist critical approaches to her work among contemporary Chinese scholars. Among Austen's works, Pride and Prejudice has remained at the centre of scholarly and popular attention and has had a major impact on Chinese readers’ view of Austen as a feminist writer. Anglo-American scholarship commonly considers Austen's feminism in relation with her contemporary Mary Wollstonecraft's feminist thought. Unfamiliar with Wollstonecraft, Chinese scholars and general readers tend to read Austen rather differently, and their exploration of her engagement with ‘the woman question’ is instead closely connected with the development of Marxism and gender studies in contemporary China.

Volland N.

Austen J.

One of the first of Jane Austen's novels to be written, and one of the last to be published, Northanger Abbey is both an amusing story of how a naive girl enters society and wins the affection of a witty young clergyman, and a high-spirited parody of the lurid Gothic novels that were popular during Austen's youth. In the process it features a vivid account of social life in late eighteenth-century Bath, and Austen's famous defence of the novel as a literary form. This edition, based on the text of the novel as published posthumously in 1818, is accompanied by explanatory notes and an appendix summarising the plots and situations of the Gothic fictions that form the basis of much of Austen's comedy. In addition there is an extensive critical introduction covering the context, publication and critical history of the novel, a chronology of Austen's life and an authoritative textual apparatus.

Zedong M.