SOURCE: "The Function of Parody in Northanger Abbey," in Modern Language Quarterly, Vol. XXX, 1969, pp. 53-63.

Here, Zimmerman maintains that Northanger Abbey both parodies and employs conventional elements of sentimental fiction.

Most studies of Northanger Abbey have noted that the central problem it poses for the critic is one of unity. In addition to dealing with Catherine Morland's adventures, the book parodies other novels and thus raises the question of the relationship of the parody to the total structure. The attempted solutions of this critical problem, many of them quite cogently argued, are almost exclusively attempts to show thematic relationships between the two elements—Catherine's adventures and the references to novels. But there is another dimension to the problem. Although thematic coherence is an element in unity, the parts of an individual work, or indeed of several quite different works, may cohere thematically without necessarily convincing the reader...