Today’s episode seems nearly ripped from the headlines as Dr. Zan Cammack discusses sedition, riots, and rumor as part of the larger new media networks at play in Jane Austen’s novel Northanger Abbey. We’ll examine the pervasive theme of surveillance and political upheaval in the novel, the innovations in mapping that more concretely trace the networks of information in England, and you might be get some Bridgerton vibes as we discuss Bath as its own kind of surveillance state with scandal sheets and gossip mills.

Access to transcript available here.

Bibliography

• Cammack, Susanne S. “Fanny Price’s Social Cartography in Mansfield Park.” Nineteenth Century Studies, vol. 29, Nineteenth-Century Studies Association, 2016, pp. 37–52. 
• Hewitt, Rachel. Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey. Granta, 2011.
• Robert Hopkins. “General Tilney and Affairs of State: The Political Gothic of ‘Northanger Abbey.’” Philological Quarterly, vol. 57, no. 2, 1978, pp. 213–24.
• The Eighteenth-Century Novel and Contemporary Social Issues : An Introduction. Accessed 13 Jan. 2021.