Embodying ‘the Naïve Reader’s Shame’: Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. A Case Study

The affective turn in the humanities has placed immense importance on the cultural, historical and political meanings of emotions. In literary studies, especially, this has allowed for an opening up of the space of the narrative to pay close attention to the language of affect and emotional intensities in both historical as well as contemporary literary/non-literary archives. This article traces and analyse how ‘naivety’ came to be produced in the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth century by focusing on the figure of the naïve reader. Drawing upon the work of affect theorists, gender theorists, as well as scholars of body studies and Eighteenth-century Studies, this article analyses how anti-novel discourse reproduced the naïve reader enabling the circulation and reproduction of those affects, aesthetics and intensities it sought to censor. Firstly, it locates the figure of the naïve reader in popular periodicals and articles at the time. Secondly, it focuses on how ‘the naïve reader’ and ‘naivety’ itself gets re-produced in the novel format and how emotions like shame, do the work of censoring this naivety, particularly in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. Lastly, this article concludes with comments on the significance of the political aesthetic of the naïve reader.