Date / Time
- February 12, 2025
6:00 pm - 7:30 pm - February 19, 2025
6:00 pm - 7:30 pm - February 26, 2025
6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
- Tuition for this course is $200. Members receive exclusive discounts on our programs and courses. Not a member? Learn more.
- Please check your spam folder for your email confirmation. If you have questions, please call (215) 732-1600 or email [email protected].
- A welcome email from the instructor three weeks before the course begins. Zoom links will be sent for the course one week before the first meeting.
- All online courses are recorded and these recordings are available to watch up to thirty days after the entire course has ended.
- Registration opens for Delancey Society members on Friday, December 6th, for Rosenbach members on Friday, December 20th, and for the general public on Friday, January 3rd. Registration opens at 12:00 p.m. ET.
This course is now sold out.
New: Recording-Only Course Option
We like to keep our Rosenbach courses at a size small enough to facilitate discussion and to allow access for all students to our instructors. Because of these small class sizes, courses frequently sell out. However, we recognize that some students enjoy just watching the videos.
If you are still interested in joining the waitlist, please email [email protected].
Description
Northanger Abbey is a thoroughly charming and fun book. Though often considered the lightweight, the little sister of Austen’s five other novels, Northanger Abbey is also Austen’s most ambitious work, where she celebrates novels as the place where the “greatest powers of the mind are displayed are displayed. . . in the best chosen language.” A pretty cheeky claim for an unpublished novelist, no? Our class will examine Austen’s simple-seeming language carefully. Having told us that “A woman, especially if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can,” we will consider the knowledge this novel conceals beneath its sunny un-Gothic surface. We will, in short, read Northanger Abbey as a Gothic novel–“light and bright and sparkling,” to be sure, but Gothic.
About the Instructor
Claudia L. Johnson joined the faculty at Princeton in 1994 and was Chair of the English Department from 2004-2012. She specializes in 18th- and early 19th-century literature, with a particular emphasis on the novel. In addition to 18th-century courses, she teaches courses on Gothic fiction, sentimentality and melodrama, the history of prose style, film adaptations of novels into film, detective fiction, Samuel Johnson, and, of course, Jane Austen. Johnson’s Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures (Chicago, 2012) won the Christian Gauss Award in 2013. More recently she has published a deluxe edition of Jane Austen’s The Beautifull Cassandra (Princeton, 2018) in collaboration with artist Leon Steinmetz, and 30 Great Myths about Jane Austen (Blackwell, 2020) in collaboration with Clara Tuite. Her other books include The Blackwell Companion to Jane Austen, ed. with Clara Tuite (Blackwell, 2005), The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft (Cambridge, 2002), Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender and Sentimentality in the 1790s (Chicago, 1995), which won an Honorable Mention for the MLA Lowell Prize, and Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago, 1988). In addition, she is keenly interested in textual scholarship and has prepared editions of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey and (with Susan Wolfson) Pride and Prejudice. Her research has been supported by major fellowships, such as the NEH and the Guggenheim.
Date / Time
- February 12, 2025
6:00 pm - 7:30 pm - February 19, 2025
6:00 pm - 7:30 pm - February 26, 2025
6:00 pm - 7:30 pm