Quand la réalité devient livre Stéréotypes gothiques dans Northanger Abbey de Jane Austen (1817) et le Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse de Jean Potocki (1810)

The novels of Jane Austen and Jean Potocki, which both maintain distant ties to the gothic tradition, nonetheless develop two different relationships to it: as a sort of Don Quixote of the gothic, Austen’s heroine, steeped in English gothic, interprets reality through the topics of the fiction she reads; on the contrary, as an inheritor of the constructions of German gothic, the protagonist of Potocki’s novel finds herself plunged into a book that has become reality.