"Northanger Abbey is a comedy about reading and misreading-reading books, reading the world-and about different kinds of peril, both imagined and real. It is Jane Austen's most self-conscious work in generic terms, grounded in a tradition of metafiction (novels about novels) that looks back two centuries to Cervantes, yet also in the flashiest, most fashionable new writing of Austen's day. It shows her experimenting creatively with form and technique, reworking inherited conventions of authorial commentary and story-telling while developing her signature style of free indirect discourse, where detached narrative comes to bear the impress of a character's voice and perspective. The celebrated fifth chapter of Northanger Abbey, in which Austen steps out of her narrative frame to make a bold, eloquent case for the power of novels, is a landmark of literary history, a key moment in the elevation of the genre from dismissive, even hostile, eighteenth-century assumptions on the road to its Victorian prestige"-- Provided by publisher.