1. The language of Amazon’s teaser actually implies the opposite of surprise, in its inadvertent allusion to the response that people give when presented with a trivial choice. Do you want the medium or the large? Page 2 or page 200? “I don’t know,” the sarcastic rejoinder goes, “surprise me.”
2. The term aesthetics was coined by Alexander Baumgarten in 1735 and did not gain currency until much later, so in discussing early writings such as Joseph Addison’s “Pleasures of the Imagination,” I am referring to aesthetic discourse avant la lettre.
3. J. Paul Hunter, “Novels and ‘The Novel’: The Poetics of Embarrassment,” Modern Philology 85, no. 4 (May 1988), 483 n.7. As Michael McKeon has shown in The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1987, rpt. 2002), this surfeit of “surprising adventures” became a foil for scientific inquiry. For instance, Thomas Sprat asserted the veracity of the Royal Society’s 1667 proceedings in contrast with the fabulism of romance, “which, by multiplying varieties of extraordinary Events, and surprizing circumstances,” makes Nature seem “dull, and tasteless” (68).
4. The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). All citations of Shakespeare’s plays refer to this edition.
5. Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language: in which the words are deduced from their originals, and illustrated in their different significations by examples from the best writers, 4th ed., 2 vols. (Dublin, 1775), 2.
6. See Silvan Tompkins, Shame and Its Sisters:A Silvan Tompkins Reader, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 107.
7. Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999), 50.
8. Jerome Kagan, What Is Emotion? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 76.
9. See Barbara Kryk-Kastovsky, “Surprise, Surprise: The Iconicity-Conventionality Scale of Emotions,” in The Language of Emotions, ed. Susanne Niemeier and Rene Dirven (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1997), 156.
10. The “surprise group” of emotional terms, Osmond notes in “The Prepositions We Use in the Construal of Emotion” (in Niemeier and Dirven, The Language of Emotions), “refer only to the experience at the moment of discovery of some situation” (114).
11. For recent cognitive literary studies of sympathetic identification, see Blakey Vermeule, Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); and Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction:Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006).
12. For a study of the ways that neuroscience can help us understand aesthetic response to sites of beauty in the Sister Arts, see G. Gabrielle Starr, Feeling Beauty:The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). Using studies aided by fMRI technology, Starr has shown that exposure to various objects of aesthetic perception activate certain brain assemblies and neural regions in similar ways.
13. See Patricia Meyer Spacks, Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 24. Spacks does not claim that boredom was invented in the eighteenth century but asserts that “If new feelings arguably never manifest themselves, new concepts unequivocally do” (27). More recently, Sianne Ngai (Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012]) has posited “the interesting” as one of three salient categories of postmodern aesthetic experience. Regarding its origins in eighteenth-century discourse, Ngai remarks that it is “the only aesthetic category in our repertoire invented expressly by and for literary critics” (15).
14. Barbara Benedict (Curiosity:A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001]) focuses on precisely this inverse of (and antidote to) boredom. Whereas boredom can be seen as the jading effect of surfeit or luxury, curiosity in Benedict’s definition is the transgressive mark of social ambition, the reflection of material or spiritual restlessness (22–23).
15. See G. Gabrielle Starr, Lyric Generations: Poetry and the Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).
16. When Shelley does invoke surprise at a pivotal moment in Prometheus Unbound, it is conspicuous for its denotation of mildness and brevity. The Spirit of the Earth describes the millennial transformation of the wicked into the good as a gently purgative unmasking: “and all / Were somewhat changed, and after brief surprise / And greetings of delighted wonder, all / Went to their sleep again” (3.4.70–73). See Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Neil Fraistat and Donald Reiman (New York: Norton, 2002). Shelley’s phrasing, exemplary of what Harold Bloom has called his “urbane” style, pointedly revises the notion of apocalypse: not divine judgment but rather a psychic renovation in the mode of eighteenth-century aesthetic delight.
17. Byron [The Oxford Authors], ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 150.
18. Ian Watt posits the novel as arising from a dialectic between new Realism and old Romance—the probable and the improbable, the natural and the supernatural. See Watt’s chapter, “Realism and the Novel Form,” in The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 9–34. In a revision of Watt’s paradigm, Lennard Davis (Factual Fictions:The Origins of the English Novel [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983, rpt. 1996]) describes the novel as an evolving discursive practice rather than a stable entity.
19. In The Cure of the Passions and the Origins of the English Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Geoffrey Sill argues that authors such as Defoe and Richardson sought to “cure” or otherwise discipline the passions through the education of their characters. In a similar vein, Jon Mee in Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) studies eighteenth-century anxieties about the unruly effects of religious enthusiasm and articulates the emerging notion of literature as “a sphere in which the emotions could be regulated into a natural harmony” (53).
20. See Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 2, 18. Echoing Pinch’s emphasis on the intersubjective nature of emotion, Julie Ellison (Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999]) has argued against the notion that the popularity of the literature of sensibility was a “feminizing” trend, locating it in a longer tradition of masculine tenderness and sentiment (12).
21. This formula, McKeon (Origins of the English Novel) notes, “amounts to the insistence that the very appearance of the incredible itself has a status of a claim to historicity” (47).
22. See William Warner, Licensing Entertainment:The Elevation of Novel-Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
23. Ross Hamilton, Accident: A Philosophical and Literary History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Hamilton observes that two different categories of accident were often conflated in Enlightenment conceptions of the self: the unexpected event and, in Aristotelian terms, the mutable or nonessential quality of a thing.
24. For a consideration of early modern ideas of accident, see Michael Witmore, Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern En gland (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). Witmore has argued that sixteenth-and seventeenth-century discourses of the accidental arose from three matrices: the Calvinist theology of God’s providential intervention in the world; the cultural centrality of the stage as a representation of human experience; and the rise of Baconian scientific inquiry (154–55).
25. Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 154.
26. McKeon notes that mediation—which Warner and Clifford Siskin have proposed as a key word in defining the Enlightenment—etymologically signifies both connection or communication and intervention or division. That duality becomes important to McKeon’s argument about the homology between scientific experiment and the novelistic representation of experience: both involve observations of behavior under “controlled” situations, and both generalize from the data given by those observations. See McKeon, “Mediation as Primal Word: The Arts, the Sciences, and the Origins of the Aesthetic,” in This Is Enlightenment, ed. Clifford Siskin and William Warner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 385.
27. John Ellis, The Surprize: Or, The Gentleman Turn’d Apothecary. A tale written originally in French prose; afterwards translated into Latin; and from thence now versified in Hudisbrastics (London, 1739). Accessed on Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO).
1. David Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), xii, 27–28.
2. Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. W. Rhys Roberts, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Prince ton: Prince ton University Press, 1984), 2183.
3. “This sense of wonder,” Socrates says, “is the mark of the philosopher. Philosophy indeed has no other origin.” See “Theatetus,” trans. F.M. Cornford, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Prince ton: Prince ton University Press, 1961), 860. In his commentary on the dialogue in Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), Philip Fisher asserts that “wonder has its elemental existence in surprise”—a feeling induced more typically by the visual than by other forms of perception (19).
4. The ground for Aristotle’s reevaluation of the emotions was prepared in Plato’s Academy, where, as W.W. Fortenbaugh notes in Aristotle on Emotion (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1975), participants focused on the cognitive properties of emotion. Arisotelian emotion is “intelligent behavior open to reasoned persuasion” (17).
5. Terence Cave, Recognitions:A Study in Poetics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 44. Cave has argued that “‘surprise’ is a tame and in many ways misleading equivalent,” but in the fullness of its etymology and historical inflections, the word does approximate Aristotle’s idea.
6. In Book 16 of the Poetics, Aristotle makes the distinction between discoveries made through the artifice of signs or tokens and those “arising from the incidents themselves.” See The Poetics, trans. I. Bywater, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, 2328.
7. John Dryden, “The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy” (Preface to Troilus and Criseyde), in The Works of John Dryden, vol. 13, ed. Maximilian E. Novak (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 237. For a history of the English reception of Aristotle’s Poetics see Marvin Herrick, The Poetics of Aristotle in En gland (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930). The first Latin translation published in En gland appeared in 1623, and the first English translations appeared in the late eighteenth century—Henry James Pye’s in 1788 and Thomas Twining’s in 1789.
8. See François Truffaut, Hitchcock (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), 52. Hitchcock’s “public” is of course powerless to do anything, and the promotion of suspense is a reminder of that cinematic enthrallment: it is not that simple shock is too manipulative by Hitchcock’s standards, it is that it is not manipulative enough.
9. Meir Sternberg, “Telling in Time (II): Chronology, Teleology, Narrativity,” Poetics Today 13, no. 3 (Autumn 1992), 507.
10. In Sternberg’s summary, “Aristotle would thus keep surprise in a role that is localized (for pinpointed impact), mimeticized (into fortune-reversing act), contributory (to pity-and-fear), and otherwise dependent (on well-formedness), instead of casting it as a universal narrative force in its own right” (ibid., 520).
11. Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 118.
12. See Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
13. In The Beautiful, Novel and Strange (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), Ronald Paulson has characterized the eighteenth-century discourse of aesthetics as “an antitheology, essentially deist” (x). In Shaftesbury’s philosophy, God is the architect of a divine order that encompasses both the universe and the individual mind, and the ideal of beauty replaces the notion of the immanence of deity (3).
14. See Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 13, 18.
15. René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, trans. Stephen Voss (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1989), 56 (Art. 70). Descartes’s treatise is divided into articles; references to this work are cited by page number within the modern translation and by article number.
16. See Susan James, Passion and Action:The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 90, 101. James argues that the Cartesian dualism of body and soul has been overstated and that the philosopher actually asserts “the thoroughgoing interconnection” between them (107). Descartes’s main contribution to the discourse of the passions is to posit them as “an integral part of our thinking” (107).
17. Charles Taylor argues in Sources of the Self:The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989) that separation of mind from body in Cartesian, Lockean, and Calvinist accounts of the mind radically departs from Renaissance theories of the self. Gail Kern Paster in Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) emphasizes the fundamentally embodied nature of emotion in Renaissance thought, arguing that “there was no way conceptually or discursively to separate the psychological from the physiological” (12); but Descartes departed from that habit of thought in collapsing the tripartite division of the soul (rational, vegetative, animal) into one unitary soul (246).
18. See Charles Le Brun, A Method to Learn and Design the Passions (1734), trans. John Williams (Los Angeles: Clark Memorial Library, 1980). Originally published as Conference de M. Le Brun sur l’expression générale et particulière (Paris, 1698). For a discussion of Le Brun’s influence on British writers and paint ers see Alan T. McKenzie, Certain, Lively Episodes:The Articulation of Passion in Eighteenth-Century Prose (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 6–8.
19. As Joseph Roach has shown in The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), Le Brun’s facial codification of the passions exerted a strong influence on eighteenth-century thinking about drama (72). In his Essay on the Art of Acting (1749), Aaron Hill followed the example of Descartes and Le Brun in formulating the facial expressions and bodily attitudes of six primary passions, which he called “capital dramatics.” As with Le Brun, these gestures were not merely surface appearances but manifestations of the soul: before striking a pose, the actor should fix its motivating passion in mind, as if really experiencing it.
20. John Dennis, The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (Menston, UK: Scolar Press, 1971), 86. Under Dennis’s premise, “when the Imagination is so inflam’d as to render the Soul utterly incapable of reflecting there is no difference between the Images and the things themselves, as we see for example by Men in Raging Feavours” (92–93).
21. Joseph Addison, The Spectator, vol. 3, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), No. 412 (23 June 1712).
22. See Paulson, Beautiful, Novel and Strange, 53, 49.
23. See the Ars Poetica in Horace, Satires, Epistles,Art of Poetry, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926): “Aut prodesse volunt aut delectare poetae / aut simul et iucunda et idonea dicere vitae. [Poetry wants to instruct or to delight, / Or, even better, to delight and instruct at once.]” Sir Philip Sidney echoes the point in the Defence of Poesy (1595) when he claims that the end of poetry is “to teach and delight.”
24. G. Gabrielle Starr elaborates on this premise of aesthetic reception as dynamic process in Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). In her argument, “the complex thoughts, sensations, actions, and feelings that make up aesthetic experience are best understood as events” (17).
25. Jonathan Richardson, An Essay on the Theory of Painting (Menston, UK: Scolar Press, 1971), 215–16.
26. David Marshall, The Frame of Art: Fictions of Aesthetic Experience, 1750–1815 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 177.
27. Qtd. in ibid., 177.
28. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Ernest C. Mossner (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1985), I.i.10, 169.
29. Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, No. 78 (“The Power of Novelty”), ed. W.J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, 3 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 2:46.
30. Johnson, Rambler, 71, 2:5.
31. Johnson, Rambler, 137, 2:360.
32. Samuel Johnson, “Cowley,” in Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905).
33. Fisher (Wonder, the Rainbow) describes the “decay of wonder” as an “aesthetic paradox—that wonder depends on first sight and first experience and yet by the time that we are old enough to have the experience of wonder we may have already used up and dulled by repetition all of the most significant potential experiences of the truly wonderful” (19).
34. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Philips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 33.
35. See Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (New York: Routledge, 1992).
36. Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, facs. ed. of 1759 (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2000), 28.
37. Adam Smith, “The History of Astronomy” (1795), in Essays on Philosophical Subjects (New York: Garland Publishing, 1971), 3.
38. Hugh Blair, “Lecture X,” in Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. Harold F. Harding, 2 vols. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965), 1:197.
39. Blair, “Lecture XIV,” in Lectures on Rhetoric, 1:283. For a skeptical view of Smith’s and Blair’s efforts in clarifying vocabularies of the emotions see Thomas Pfau, Romantic Moods: Paranoia,Trauma, and Melancholy, 1790–1840 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). Pfau sees such semantic “policing” as “an increasingly desperate attempt to remedy the inherent ambivalence and waywardness of emotions” (5).
40. Marshall first addressed the topic in The Figure of the Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); see esp. chap. 7 on Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. In The Surprising Effects of Sympathy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), he observes a blurred boundary between art and life in the matter of sympathy (27). Marshall’s title is taken from the subtitle of a play by Marivaux, “Les effets surprenants de la sympathie” (1713). Marivaux’s word “surprenants” likely connoted the delightful and interesting, but Marshall uses it with a different inflection: the play implicitly suggests that “the art of viewing someone as spectacle, and the situation of being turned into a spectacle, may have surprising and undesired effects” (49).
41. For a consideration of the ways that reception theory and histories of reading might be complemented by cognitive science see Andrew Elfenbein, “Cognitive Science and the History of Reading,” PMLA 121, no. 2 (March 2006), 484–502.
42. Philosophical Enquiry, 25.
43. Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, ed. R.P.C. Mutter (London: Penguin, 1985), 25.
44. To Aaron Hill, 12 July 1749, in Letters of Samuel Richardson, ed. John Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), 171. The first two volumes of Clarissa had been published in December 1747, the next two in April 1748, and the final three in December 1748. In this letter Richardson admits that he has avoided reading Tom Jones and knows it only by reputation.
45. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, ed. James Kinsley and John Davie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 25.
46. See Brooks’s essay, “The Heresy of Paraphrase,” in The Well-Wrought Urn (Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1947).
47. J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 5. The paradox, acknowledged by Miller, is that by identifying and theorizing patterns of repetition the critic risks promoting the kind of familiarity that he poses as a problem in aesthetic pleasure.
48. The critical vocabulary of surprise persists in the scholarly movement that is usually seen as a reaction against New Criticism. New Historicist scholars of the early modern period often address the cultural affect of wonder and various phenomena described as wonders; and the language of surprise and wonderment—of bafflement and intrigue in the presence of the strange—suffuses their encounters with texts, discourses, and cultural practices.
49. See Bertrand Rougé, ed., La Surprise: actes du sixième colloque du CICADA, “Rhetorique des Arts,” 9–11 mai 1996 (Pau, France: Publications de l’Université de Pau, 1998). I am referring to Rougé’s prefatory essay, “Out of Place: Le Lieu de la Relation et la Surprise du Déjà-Connu,” 7–14. Rougé deliberately uses the English phrase to denote a particular quality of surprise—an intersection of the temporal and the spatial: “La surprise, c’est donc quand advient quelque chose que je ne peux très bien connaître, mais là où je ne l’attends pas” (10). In another essay in the collection (“Surprise et Visitation,” 23–31), Raymond Court agrees with Rougé that aesthetic forms of surprise are no mere accident: “notre rencontre avec une oeuvre n’est jamais pure passivité ni la surprise due à un simple hasard”; one rather has an accessibility to experience that Court likens to George Steiner’s definition of cortesia (24).
50. See Gretchen Wheelock, Haydn’s Ingenious Jesting with Art (New York: Schirmer Books, 1992), 17. Giuseppe Carpani, an early Haydn biographer, is partly responsible for the myth; but as Wheelock notes, another early biographer, August Griesinger, disputed that account by reporting that Haydn himself told him that he “was interested in surprising the public with something new, and in making a brilliant debut.”
51. The structural inverse of the “Surprise” trick is the musical conceit in Haydn’s string quartet, opus 33, subtitled “The Joke”: the music seems to end, prompting the dutiful audience to applaud—until the music inexplicably resumes. This false ending occurs three times before the real one, so the listener scarcely knows whether to trust the final silence.
52. A telling difference between eighteenth-century British and German culture can be seen in the different nicknames Haydn’s symphony received: the “Paukenschlag” (“drum strike”) in Germany, the “Surprise” in London. The first name emphasizes the effect, the other the cause; the first emphasizes a purely musical property, the second verges on the narrative.
53. Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought:The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 24–25. Insofar as emotions “involve judgments about the salience for our well-being of uncontrolled external objects,” Nussbaum finds that fiction preeminently engages that imaginative act (1).
54. See Paul E. Griffiths, What Emotions Really Are:The Problem of Psychological Categories (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 2.
55. Jerome Kagan, What Is Emotion? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 21. Kagan insists on the difference between the unexpected and the unfamiliar, and he identifies four distinct states of feeling: the unexpected but familiar event that is quickly assimilated; the unfamiliar and unexpected; the unexpected but familiar; and the unfamiliar and unexpected phenomenon that eludes the understanding. See Kagan, 63, 68–69.…
56. Kagan, What Is Emotion?, 70.
57. For Ekman’s early pioneering work see Paul Ekman, Wallace V. Friesen, and Phoebe Ellsworth, Emotion in the Human Face (New York: Pergamon Press 1972). For more recent work see Ekman, What the Face Reveals: Basic and Applied Studies of Spontaneous Expression Using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
58. See Paul Ekman, Wallace V. Friesen, and Ronald C. Simons, “Is the Startle Reaction an Emotion?,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 49, no. 5 (1985), 1424.
59. Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the “Death of the Subject” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 47, 11. “The difficulty of representing emotion,” she remarks, “is the difficulty of knowing what it is, not just for poststructuralist theory but for any theory” (41).
1. See Robert C. Solomon, The Passions (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1976), 129–30. Rei Terada (Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the “Death of the Subject” [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001]) similarly observes that emotions are often described as imposed upon the subject, as in expressions such as “seized by remorse.”
2. See Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought:The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Nussbaum sees emotions as “forms of evaluative judgment” (22) rather than “unthinking energies” (24–25).
3. Angus Fletcher, Allegory:The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964), 150.
4. Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 23.
5. For commentary on the gap between allegorical character and reader, see Susan Lindgren Wofford, The Choice of Achilles:The Ideology of Figure in the Epic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 220. An extreme example of that gap can be found in Aesopian fable, as James Nohrnberg notes in The Analogy of The Faerie Queene (Prince ton: Prince ton University Press, 1976), 97.
6. Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin:The Reader in Paradise Lost, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967, rpt. 1997), 1. Fish’s study draws an Aristotelian nexus between characters’ and readers’ experiences, and the book’s subtitle, “The Reader in Paradise Lost,” places both groups, so to speak, on the same page. Maureen Quilligan (The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979]) adopts Fish’s strategy in modeling a close reading of the opening tableau of The Faerie Queene (228).
7. Claude Rawson (Satire and Sentiment 1660–1830: Stress Points in the English Augustan Tradition [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994, rpt. 2000]) has articulated “the persis tent feeling we get in Paradise Lost that Milton was engaged in a critique of the heroic at the same time as writing the last distinguished Eu rope an poem in the older epic mode” (108).
8. See Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century En gland (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 80. For an exploration of Milton’s heretical dissolution of the soul–body division within the intellectual milieu of seventeenth-century philosophy, see esp. 79–110.
9. This point is driven home in the Christian Doctrine: “Neither does God make an evil will out of a good one, but he directs a will which is already evil so that it may produce out of its own wickedness either good for others or punishment for itself, though it does so unknowingly intending something quite different.” See Milton, Christian Doctrine, trans. John Carey, in Complete Prose Works, vol. 6 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 332.
10. As Leslie Brisman notes in Milton’s Poetry of Choice and Its Romantic Heirs (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), “Against the awareness of the weight of human events that separate us from the Fall, the poet works to recreate the feeling of the presentness of the past and the suspension of what has in fact already occurred” (56).
11. Milton’s etymological wordplay on pre-and postlapsarian senses is a well-known feature of the poem; for a particularly astute account, see Christopher Ricks, Milton’s Grand Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983).
12. For a thorough explanation of Milton’s conception of free will, see Dennis Danielson’s Milton’s Good God: A Study in Literary Theodicy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). There is an element of passivity in Milton’s idea of prevenient grace, for “free will is unable to begin or to perfect any true and spiritual good without grace” (71); but “man is free either to reject it and use his own innate power to sin, or else accept it, and use the power received from God to refrain from sinning” (87).
13. Milton, Christian Doctrine, 6.388.
14. As Teskey puts it in Allegory and Violence, “Error tells us not only what she means but what sort of book we are reading, what conventions apply” (3).
15. Wofford notes that Spenser’s good knights typically display “chivalric fury”—an impulse that can be channeled to noble purposes but frequently becomes a figure for a demonic possession that seems formally indistinguishable from the representation of sinful states such as Jealousy or Lust (Choice of Achilles, 305).
16. Jeffrey Dolven, Scenes of Instruction in Re nais sance Romance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 147. Dolven notes that in Humanistic pedagogy, the pupil’s ability to repeat a lesson is a sign of successful learning, but in The Faerie Queene, “repetition is precisely the sign of the failure to learn” (141). Several critics have observed this pattern of fallibility. Isabel MacCaffrey (Spenser’s Allegory:The Anatomy of Imagination [Prince ton: Prince ton University Press, 1976]) suggests that Redcrosse’s “entanglement with Error enacts his own blindness” (144), but “the consequences of experience are often manifested as an advance in the hero’s strength, competence or understanding” (39 n.4). Nohrnberg argues that “Redcrosse has slain Error, but understood nothing” (Analogy of The Faerie Queene, 124).
17. See John M. Steadman, Epic and Tragic Structure in “Paradise Lost” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 60–72. Steadman notes that such recognition scenes are often more gradual than what Aristotle formulated for tragedy.
18. Most famously, Samuel Johnson condemned Milton’s plot machinery as “unskillful” for its awkward mixture of static abstraction and active agency. See Johnson’s “Life of Milton” in Lives of the English Poets, 3 vols., ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), 1:185. For a survey of eighteenth-century opinion on Milton’s allegorical personifications, see Stephen Knapp, Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 52–65.
19. In The Language of Allegory, Quilligan characterizes allegory as a genre that directly addresses the production of meaning. She further explores this premise in Milton’s Spenser: The Politics of Reading (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 125–28. Here, she argues that Milton’s allegory of Sin and Death is a “fallen literary mode” (127) that deliberately represents fallenness, and that it reminds the reader of the fictive nature of the narrative itself. Wofford similarly argues that “Spenser tells us explicitly that allegory is a fallen mode, appropriate for conveying knowledge in a fallen world” (Choice of Achilles, 303). Barbara Lewalski in “Paradise Lost” and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms (Prince ton: Prince ton University Press, 1985) suggests that “By portraying Sin and Death as allegorical characters Milton emphasizes their ontological status as concepts, lacking the reality of living beings” (74). Stephen Fallon concurs, arguing that Sin and Death are pointedly not separate beings but rather “the privation of being itself” (183) and a mea sure of “the negative ontological distance between Lucifer and Satan” (185). Victoria Kahn (“Allegory, the Sublime, and the Rhetoric of Things Indifferent in Paradise Lost,” in Creative Imitation: New Essays on Renaissance Literature in Honor of Thomas M. Greene, ed. David Quint et al. [Binghampton: State University of New York, 1992], 127–52) suggests that the episode “dramatizes the theological indifference of rhetorical figures, which is a condition of correct interpretation and free will” (128). Kahn posits that the success of the allegory depends upon the discretion and capability of the individual believer.
20. See Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), trans. James Strachey (New York: Liveright, 1961), 6. In Freud’s quasi-biological account, “Protection against stimuli is an almost more important function for the living organism than reception of stimuli” (21); and a traumatic neurosis is “a consequence of an extensive breach being made in the protective shield against stimuli” (25). For Caruth’s commentary, see Unclaimed Experience:Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 5–6.
21. Quotations from the poem refer to John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. David Scott Kastan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2005).
22. Kahn has called the naming of Sin a “forced signification” that leaves no room for the reader’s interpretive free will. In this way, “the episode could be said to perform its own immanent critique of the literary: the claim to unmediated imaginative activity is itself a form of violence, of reification, and of rebellion” (136).
23. For commentary on wonder in Paradise Lost, see chapter 8 of Steadman, Epic and Tragic Structure. On the distinction between diabolical and divine wonders, Steadman notes that Renaissance critics typically invoked “God’s indisputable power to suspend the laws of nature and perform what ever miracles he chose” (115).
24. Michael Murrin, History and Warfare in Re nais sance Epic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 123. In Murrin’s premise, “The gun posed a problem for writers of romance and epic that had no parallels in tradition” (123); and its use was considered fatal to the ideal of military glory and associated with the deceitful and unchivalric (130).
25. Rawson, Satire and Sentiment, 119.
26. See John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).
27. Wofford sees in Paradise Lost a “disjunction between action and figure,” which “informs and makes possible the central compromise of the poem between free will and God’s (and the poet’s) foreknowledge of what will happen, or between Milton’s Arminianism and his affirmation of predestination” (373).
28. I agree with Fallon that Sin’s narration of her birth is “an alternative vision of the fall” that parallels Raphael’s allegory-free narration of the war in heaven; and the two visions “cannot occupy the same ontological space,” since Sin and Death are purely privative entities (see Milton among the Philosophers, 185). What Fallon does not register, however, is the extent to which Raphael’s narration of the war recapitulates the surprising effects of Sin, and how reverberations are felt in the earthly fall.
29. The pun in the word “astonied” might suggest Ovidian petrifaction, but Barbara Pavlock (Eros, Imitation, and the Epic Tradition [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990]) also sees an allusion to the moment when Aeneas is rendered speechless by Mercury’s warning in Book 4 that he should leave Carthage (206).
30. This insight is famously expressed in Augustine’s meditation on time in Book 11 of the Confessions. See The Confessions, ed. R.S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1961, rpt. 1985), 259.
31. Simon Jarvis, Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 161.
1. Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, ed. John Richetti (London: Penguin Books, 2001). Ian Watt (The Rise of the Novel, [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957]), credits Crusoe as the first novel, in that “an ordinary person’s daily activities are the center of continuous literary attention” (74). Since Watt’s seminal study, Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister (1683–85) has often been cited as an even earlier novel; but for a recent caveat about applying a stabilizing genre term to a nascent hybrid form, see G. Gabrielle Starr, Lyric Generations: Poetry and the Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 50–51.
2. See Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, rpt. 2002), 47. Lennard J. Davis (Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983, rpt. 1996) sees Crusoe and other early novels as part of “an information-disseminating system” (191), before generic distinctions between “news” and “novel” had solidified.
3. For a study of the eighteenth-century conception of the passions as it pertains to fiction, see Geoffrey Sill, The Cure of the Passions and the Origins of the English Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). For Defoe, Sill observes, “the passions are a category of instability in human nature that must be addressed before questions of virtue and truth can be raised”; and the central subject of his novels is the “curing” of the passions (7–8).
4. Scott Gordon, The Power of the Passive Self in English Literature, 1640–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 34.
5. Watt does not discount the role of Puritan introspection and Calvinist ideology, but he sees Crusoe as a secular figure whose bookkeeping is more entrepreneurial than spiritual. See Watt’s chapter on Crusoe in The Rise of the Novel, 60–92. For studies of the novel as Puritan autobiography, see G.A. Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography (Prince ton: Prince ton University Press, 1965); J. Paul Hunter, The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe’s Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in “Robinson Crusoe” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966); and Leopold Damrosch, God’s Plot and Man’s Stories (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). For discussion of the novel’s engagement with Eu rope an imperialism, see Christopher Loar, “How to Say Things with Guns: Military Technology and the Politics of Robinson Crusoe,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 19, nos. 1–2 (2006–7), 1–20.
6. Both Richetti (Defoe’s Narratives: Situation and Structure [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975]) and Damrosch argue that the ideologies of capitalism and Puritanism were more complementary than opposed. Responding to Watt’s and Starr’s different accounts, Richetti notes that Crusoe is “neither exclusively a masterful economic individual nor a heroically spiritual slave” (23). Damrosch points out, in a Weberian vein, that “Puritanism was subsiding into bourgeois Nonconformity, no longer an ideology committed to reshaping the world, but rather a social class seeking religious ‘toleration’ and economic advantage” (189).
7. Richetti, Defoe’s Narratives, 12.
8. Here, Richetti seems to echo the claims of Wolfgang Iser’s The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), which was published a year before his monograph on Defoe.
9. See Claude Rawson, God, Gulliver, and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination, 1492–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 66. Christopher Loar has argued that gunfire in Crusoe serves as “a figure for the violence and warfare that lurk at the foundational moment of sovereignty as well as of the ideology of liberty that makes sovereignty’s violence tolerable” (1).
10. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions:The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 14. Greenblatt sees the philosophical discourse on wonder and the literature of New World encounter as mutually influential. In medieval scholastic conceptions, wonder was “a sign of dispossession,” but in the Renaissance, it became “an agent of appropriation”: the state of admiration is prologue to possession and colonization (24).
11. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Niditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, rpt. 1987), 185 (II.xiv.10).
12. Loar observes that the gun “created the conditions for ‘peaceful’ negotiations” with easily awed West Africans (“How to Say Things,” 12), but he adds that there was also a politics of intimidation at home, in that “the Whig regime of the early Hanoverian period, with all its rhetoric of liberty, sought to impose its authority through violence direct and indirect” (20). See also Gary Hentzi, “Sublime Moments and Social Authority in Robinson Crusoe and A Journal of the Plague Year,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 26, no. 3 (Spring 1993), 419–34. Hentzi argues that scenes of fear and violence in Crusoe constitute a kind of proto-sublime before Burke and Kant theorized the mode later in the century.
13. For a thorough study of the Puritan tradition of Providence literature, see Hunter, The Reluctant Pilgrim. In reaction against deistic notions of an impersonal and ahistorical Creator, Christian apologists of the early eighteenth century argued for a benevolent God with an active hand in human affairs (51). As Hunter notes, such writers asserted the orthodoxy of revealed religion rather than the deistical concept of natural religion. On the latter strain of thought in Crusoe, see Ilse Vickers, Defoe and the New Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Vickers argues that Defoe espoused a brand of “natural theology,” which held that the universe was created for man’s benefit, and that studying nature was tantamount to knowing God (112).
14. Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975).
15. Damrosch has suggested that “a strong lyric impulse underlies the earliest novels”; in particular, he is referring to the genre’s emphasis on the truth of individual subjectivity (God’s Plot and Man’s Stories, 209). I would add that Crusoe’s quasi-lyric outbursts and episodes of surprise might be called, in the poetic language of a later era, “strange fits of passion.”
16. Ross Hamilton (Accident: A Philosophical and Literary History [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007]) sees the eighteenth-century interpretation of accidental events as moving in two directions, the empirical and the providential: either causal, scientific explanation or divine intervention. He cites Crusoe’s discovery of English barley as an illustration of this ambiguity (140–42).
17. Virginia Woolf, “Robinson Crusoe,” in The Second Common Reader, ed. Andrew McNeillie (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 56. In The Prose of Things:Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), Cynthia Wall argues that despite their allegorical significance, things in Crusoe are “emblems reconstituted back into things for their own sake” (110).
18. Damrosch notes that Crusoe often uses “secret” in association with “emotions of self-satisfaction,” and that Defoe might have in mind the sense of the word as Addison uses it to describe the “secret refreshment” that can be taken in a vivid description (God’s Plot and Man’s Stories, 198). But “secret” also denotes both the workings and hints of Providence and the mysterious inner movements of the soul: as Damrosch remarks, “Crusoe learns to identify Providence with his own desires” (198–99).
19. Joseph Addison, The Spectator, vol. 3, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), No. 477, 6 September 1712.
20. Richetti argues that the appearance of the footprint is apt in two ways: in ideological terms, Crusoe’s serenity must be shattered, because bourgeois contentment is inevitably disturbed by the presence and claims of others; in structural terms, the surprise is part of the novel’s dynamic of extremes, the pendulum swing from pastoral isolation to “state of war” (Defoe’s Narratives, 51).
21. See Marshall, “Autobiographical Acts in Robinson Crusoe,” English Literary History 71 (2004). “Terrifying in its literal specificity and its ultimate abstractness, the print signifies simply someone else” (910–11).
22. Daniel Defoe, Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe with His Vision of the Angelic World (Boston: David Nickerson, 1903), 251.
23. G.A. Starr, Defoe and Casuistry (Prince ton: Prince ton University Press, 1971), 7. Starr notes that in Crusoe’s dialogue with Friday, casuistry becomes “a heuristic mode,” and that Crusoe is “remarkably free from dogmatism” (4–5).
24. For an investigation of the Enlightenment philosophy of mental causation and its literary implications, see Jonathan Kramnick, Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).
25. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill, ed. C.B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968, rpt. 1986), 129–30 (I.vi).
26. Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, ed. Anthony Burgess and Christopher Bristow (London: Penguin, 1966), 31–32.
27. For a rich study of Defoe’s engagement with apparition narratives, see Jayne Lewis, “Spectral Currencies in the Air of Reality: A Journal of the Plague Year and the History of Apparitions,” Representations 87 (Summer 2004), 82–101. Lewis argues that apparition narratives are “self-consciously literary structures, too firmly wedded to the metaphysics of apparition itself to liberate themselves” (90) from a strictly empiricist paradigm.
1. Ruth Yeazell observes in Fictions of Modesty:Women and Courtship in the English Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) that Pamela’s swoon after B assaults her in bed not only prevents a rape but also convinces B that she is genuine in her protestations of virtue (90).
2. See William Warner, Licensing Entertainment:The Elevation of Novel-Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Warner favors the word “entertainment” as “the most precise general term for what Richardson and Fielding are providing their readers in the 1740s,” in that the word implies “a sustaining social exchange” between performer and audience and the notion of a leisurely diversion from more serious concerns (231–32).
3. Samuel Richardson, Pamela; Or,Virtue Rewarded, ed. Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). All quotations from the novel refer to this edition, which represents the original 1740 publication.
4. As Robert Alter argues in Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), the eighteenth-century enterprise of literary realism was complicated by novelists’ acute awareness of fictionality (x).
5. The concept of “absorption” as defined by Michael Fried in Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980) has pertinent applications to fiction, especially that of the eighteenth century. Warner has argued that Pamela is antitheatrical, in that Richardson uses strategies akin to “absorptive painting” to produce a “realist effect of immediacy and unselfconsciousness” (Licensing Entertainment, 226).
6. In Framing Feeling: Sentiment and Style in English Prose Fiction, 1745–1800 (New York: AMS Press, 1994), Barbara Benedict notes that “the sensation of surprise itself is an instinctive reaction, which sentimental theory celebrates” (5). As Benedict argues, “Sentimental fiction adheres to a dialectical structure that endorses yet edits the feelings in fiction” (1). This is certainly true of Pamela: while we imaginatively participate in the heroine’s surprises and other emotional reactions, we also stand apart and judge them.
7. See Doody, A Natural Passion:A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 35–36.
8. As J. Paul Hunter has observed in Before Novels:The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990), the early novel “tames violence and sexual aberration within a structure of everyday experience very much as it domesticates the surprising, the unexplained, and the wonderful” (37). For a complication of the romance/novel dialectic, see Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, rpt. 2002), esp. 52–64. Already in the seventeenth century, French heroic romance “characteristically justifies itself by reference to the doctrine of vraisemblance, and associating its fictionality with a quasi-Aristotelian ‘probability’” (54), and by 1660 this form was supplanted by romans à clef and chroniques scandaleuses, which were quickly translated into English.
9. The moral purposes of both Richardson and Fielding have been well established by critics. As Warner puts it, Pamela “recounts how a young girl with prudential parental warnings and innocent of novel reading nonetheless finds herself within a novel,” while “it casts B. as a reformed novel reader” (186). Warner’s examination of the relation between Pamela and earlier amatory fiction was preceded by Nancy K. Miller’s chapter on the novel in The Heroine’s Text: Readings in the French and English Novel, 1722–1782 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 37–59. For another study of Richardson’s ambivalence about the entertaining dimension of his writing, see James Turner, “Novel Panic: Picture and Performance in the Reception of Richardson’s Novels,” Representations 48 (Autumn 1994), 70–96. Turner argues that while Richardson characterized his efforts as a form of “Accommodation to the Manners and Taste of an Age overwhelmed with a Torrent of Luxury,” he was nevertheless “deeply implicated in that culture, not only in his marketing strategy and his passionate cultivation of ‘new Impressions,’ but also in his metaphorics of Luxury display and performance” (76–77).
10. To Aaron Hill, 26 January 1746/7, in Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson, ed. John Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), 78.
11. For a survey of the contemporary reception of Pamela, see Turner, “Novel Panic.” Warner’s chapter on the novel in Licensing Entertainment illuminates the issues at stake in the three anonymously published anti-Pamelist publications of 1741. While Richardson insisted on Pamela’s interiority as sufficient moral framing, anti-Pamelists asserted the possibility of theatrical exteriority—the broader horizon of the outsider’s titillated imagination. That conflict, Warner argues, represents a larger cultural debate over “what reading for pleasure should be” (223).
12. To George Cheyne, 31 August 1741, in Selected Letters, 47. Richardson had described his intentions in similar terms to Aaron Hill in a letter earlier that year (41).
13. Mark Kinkead-Weekes (Samuel Richardson: Dramatic Novelist [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973]) sees Pamela as exercising “a quality of forgiveness which erases the past and begins moral judgment afresh, provided there is a genuine turning-point of reformation” (68). The relation between the two halves of Pamela has been widely commented on, but for a compelling recent account, see Vivasvan Soni, Mourning Happiness: Narrative and the Politics of Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010).
14. One of the most thorough appreciations of Haywood’s art to date has been Warner’s assessment of the author as an innovator of “formula fiction,” which follows familiar patterns and therefore ensures its popularity among readers seeking a repeatable pleasure (112–15). Warner asserts the commercial and artistic value in what John Richetti had earlier dismissed in Popular Fiction before Richardson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969) as repetitious variations on “the fable of persecuted innocence” (207).
15. See Eliza Haywood, The Surprize, Or, Constancy Rewarded (London, 1724). (Haywood is anonymously identified on the title page as “the Author of The Masqueraders, or Fatal Curiosity.”) Accessed on Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO).
16. Ros Ballaster (Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992]) argues that “The business of Haywood’s amatory plots is to engage the female reader’s sympathy and erotic pleasure, rather than stimulate intellectual judgment” (170). This is certainly true, although Haywood’s alertness to the manifestations of surprise suggests some authorial concern about judgment as well as pleasure.
17. See Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness:The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).
18. See Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization:The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century Culture and Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 44–45. Ballaster draws a parallel between masquerade and amatory fiction such as Haywood’s: both involve an ambiguity between sexual pleasure and sexual predation or abuse, and both involve transgressions of class and gender boundaries (Seductive Forms, 179).
19. See Haywood, Fantomina and Other Works, ed. Alexander Pettit, Margaret Case Croskery, and Anna C. Patchias (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2004).
20. For a reading that emphasizes the similarities between Fanny and Pamela, see Yeazell’s chapter on Cleland’s Memoirs in Fictions of Modesty, 102–21. For another study that aligns the sentimental poetics of Cleland’s Memoirs with Pamela, see Ann Louise Kibbie, “Sentimental Properties: Pamela and Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure,” English Literary History 58, no. 3 (Autumn 1991), 561–77.
21. For a consideration of Cleland’s novel in the stronger terms of the Sublime, see Mark Blackwell, “‘It Stood an Object of Terror and Delight’: Sublime Masculinity and the Aesthetics of Disproportion in John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure,” Eighteenth-Century Novel 2 (2003), 39–63.
22. John Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, ed. Peter Sabor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985, rpt. 1999), 4.
23. To Aaron Hill, 26 January 1746/7, in Selected Letters, 81–82.
24. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience,” in Essays: First and Second Series (New York: Library of America, 1990), 253.
25. The conspicuous pleasure with which Pamela relates the effect of her pastoral outfit in Letter 24 gave fodder for anti-Pamelists such as Fielding to cast doubt on the heroine’s guilelessness. For a reading of the scene that rescues it from that narrow critique, see Kinkead-Weekes, Samuel Richardson, 7–19. Under the premise that Richardson’s art is fundamentally dramatic in its capacity to represent or imply multiple perspectives, Kinkead-Weekes argues that the scene allows for an ironization of Pamela’s self-satisfaction. Mr. B’s jibe (“you are a lovelier Girl by half than Pamela”) “aptly punishes the girl’s pleasure in her own reflection” (15).
26. George Herbert, The Complete English Poems, ed. John Tobin (London: Penguin, 1991), 40.
27. Doody means love when she refers to “a natural passion” (the phrase is from Grandison), but clearly other passions are also at work in Pamela; and one passionate outburst on Mrs. Jewkes’s part can be seen as balancing another. Within the realm of pastoral comedy that Doody identifies, her description of Pamela as “governed by emotion and instinct” could also be applied to the older and more experienced Mrs. Jewkes.
28. As Miller observes of Pamela, “love made her its victim by sneak attack, and she maintains the alibi of ignorance: literally, she did not see it coming” (Heroine’s Text, 47). While Miller does not address the role of surprise in the novel, her choice of the phrase “sneak attack” aptly catches its aesthetics of shock; elsewhere, she refers to B’s summer house seduction in similar terms: “Pamela, clearly, succumbs to the first kiss only because of the violence of the surprise attack” (42).
29. In her reading of Pamela’s scribal discovery of “Love,” Yeazell notes that even this feeling is held at a critical and cautious distance; Pamela marks a psychic division in herself in order to upbraid what she calls her “treacherous heart” (94).
30. In McKeon’s observation, “writing to the moment” is “closely related to the self-reflexive effect by which the narrative incorporates, as its subject matter, the process of its own production and consumption” (Origins of the English Novel, 358). McKeon particularly refers to visible and material elements of formal realism: gaps or interruptions in the text where Pamela leaves off writing; references to the surreptitious acquisition of writing materials and the collection of letters into sequestered packets; and the use of those letters as a canonical “text” or authoritative account by characters within the story.
31. For a consideration of the theatrical underpinnings of Richardson’s fiction, see Ira Konigsberg, Samuel Richardson and the Dramatic Novel (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1968). Without denying the importance of the epistolary mode, Konigsberg argues that Richardson “brought to the English novel subject matter and techniques developed in the drama” (2); and he traces themes, situations, and character types from restoration comedy and sentimental tragedy. Kinkead-Weekes echoes Konigsberg’s premise, but he uses the notion of the “dramatic” in broader and less historically specific ways. In essence, the term sponsors the kind of meticulous close reading that he insists Richardson’s scenes merit (Samuel Richardson, 15).
32. Doody classifies Pamela as a pastoral comedy featuring a “sturdy little heroine,” a clumsy country squire with an “adolescent rawness in his openness of motive,” and of course a wedding (Natural Passion, 69). “Richardson loves ritual,” she notes, “and each of the novels moves toward a ceremonial moment” (64); and here I would add that the reunion scene between Pamela and her father serves as an accidental ceremonial moment, a narratable anecdote in prologue to the actual betrothal.
33. It is only in retrospect, of course, that Pamela can inscribe that providential assurance into her narrative. Soni’s characterization of the hermeneutics of the trial is particularly relevant here (Mourning Happiness, 187–210).
34. See Michael Wood, The Road to Delphi:The Life and Afterlife of Oracles (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003). “When the player picks the wrong name, he hasn’t exactly missed the oracle’s meaning. He has chosen one meaning and ceased to look for others,” Wood observes (51). The intended answer to B’s riddle is Goodman Andrews, but both Williams and B himself are other plausible possibilities: in essence, Williams stands for the discarded past and B the hopeful future. As Wood remarks about our experience of oracles and other predictions, we make two assumptions about the future: “that it is unknowable, and that once it’s here we saw it coming” (33).
35. In Warner’s observation, Mr. B, for all of his accusations of Pamela as romancer, “has his own fictions to propound”; and through letters, he manages to deceive both Williams and Andrews, inventively deploying “aristocratic themes of paternalistic care and forced marriages” (Licensing Entertainment, 360).
36. Warner reads this scene as exemplifying the dynamics of interiority vs. external observation at work in the reader’s relation to the text. Whereas Pamela feels fear and anxiety, B (and perhaps the reader) experiences titillation. In the anti-Pamelist discourse that grew up around the novel, the author of Pamela Censured (1741) argued that the scene could be construed as encouragement to aspiring male lovers who would discompose their mistresses simply to see them swoon (Licensing Entertainment, 214–15).
37. See Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions:The Origins of the English Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983, rpt. 1996), 185.
38. See D.A. Miller, Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel (Prince ton: Prince ton University Press, 1981), 265.
39. For a reading of the darker implications of this episode, see Albert Rivero, “The Place of Sally Godfrey in Richardson’s Pamela,” in Passion and Virtue: Essays on the Novels of Samuel Richardson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 52–72. Rivero finds fault with previous critics who have either insufficiently treated the episode or accepted the providential logic of the plot—reading “auspiciously” rather than “suspiciously.” For a broader ethical consideration of the ways that the success stories of autobiographical narratives are predicated on the suffering or exclusion of inconvenient characters, see James O’Rourke, Sex, Lies and Autobiography:The Ethics of Confession (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006). Though O’Rourke does not consider eighteenth-century fiction, his commentary on the “moral luck” that Jane Eyre enjoys in Charlotte Brontë’s novel has relevance to the providential narrative of Pamela.
40. Kinkead-Weekes notes that the Sally Godfrey episode functions as moral parable that moves well beyond “the simple puritan horror of sexual excess” (Samuel Richardson, 68), expressing instead Pamela’s exemplary capacity of forgiveness and “the sincere wish to break with the past” (69).
1. In God’s Plot and Man’s Stories (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), Leo Damrosch observes that Fielding’s narrative persona “acts as the disposing deity of the fictional universe” (263). Michael McKeon surveys the critical tradition of associating Fielding with Providence in The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 407. Robert Alter (Fielding and the Nature of the Novel [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968]) sees Fielding as liberating eighteenth-century English fiction from the constraints of formal realism. William Warner (Licensing Entertainment:The Elevation of Novel-Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998]) argues that Fielding, in the role of “trickster-illusionist” (259), goads the reader into becoming a savvy, “self-conscious consumer” (269).…
2. 2. McKeon, Origins of the English Novel, 408.
3. See McKeon, “Mediation as a Primal Word: The Arts, the Sciences, and the Origins of the Aesthetic,” in This Is Enlightenment, ed. Clifford Siskin and William Warner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 397–98.
4. “Plan of a late celebrated Novel,” London Magazine, February 1748/9, xviii.51–55, in Henry Fielding:The Critical Heritage, ed. Ronald Paulson and Thomas Lockwood (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), 148.
5. Francis Coventry, “An Essay on a New Species of Writing” (1751), in Paulson and Lockwood, Henry Fielding, 266.
6. Arthur Murphy, “An Essay on the Life and Genius of Henry Fielding, Esq,” in The Works of HF, Esq.: with the Life of the Author (1762), in Paulson and Lockwood, Henry Fielding, 425. For a consideration of Fielding’s engagement with the reader, see Sandra Sherman, “Reading at Arm’s Length: Fielding’s Contract with the Reader in Tom Jones,” Studies in the Novel 30, no. 2 (Summer 1998), 232–45. Sherman describes Fielding’s authorial persona as that of an “anxious” tradesman worried about whether his readers will buy his product.
7. Vivasvan Soni, Mourning Happiness: Narrative and the Politics of Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010).
8. As Patricia Meyer Spacks (Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Novels [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990]) notes, “Lady Booby, Slipslop, and Betty at the inn all attack the hero with traditionally male directness,” but these comic encounters are still played out against a background of male “operations of power” (61).
9. See Shame and Its Sisters:A Silvan Tompkins Reader, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 107–8.
10. Paul E. Griffiths defines the propositional attitude account and sketches the central debates in emotion theory in What Emotions Really Are:The Problem of Psychological Categories (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 2.
11. In his The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), Roach argues that Garrick “renovated theatrical semiotics, founding his vocabulary of expressive gesture on a new order of understanding, a revised concept of what nature is and means” (56).
12. See John Bender, “Novel Knowledge: Judgment, Experience, Experiment,” in Siskin and Warner, This Is Enlightenment, 290–93.
13. J. Paul Hunter, Occasional Form: Henry Fielding and the Chains of Circumstance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 20.
14. Henry Fielding, The tragedy of tragedies; or,The life and death of Tom Thumb the Great; with the annotations of H. Scriblerus Secundus, ed. James T. Hill house (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1918). The play was first produced in 1730 as Tom Thumb: A Tragedy, as a two-act afterpiece to The Author’s Farce. It was so successful that Fielding revised and expanded it as a three-act play, with commentary, the following year.
15. Referring to Mr. Booby’s first sexual overture, Shamela confides to her mother that she “pretended to be shy” and “pretended to be angry” (14–15). Later, describing a similar intrusion, she reports that she “pretended” to try to leave (16). See Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Shamela (London: Penguin, 1999).
16. Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, ed. R.P.C. Mutter (London: Penguin, 1985), 8.1.328–29.
17. Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, ed. R.F. Brissenden (London: Penguin, 1985). All quotations refer to this edition, with citations of book, chapter, and page numbers.
18. Blakey Vermeule, Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 109–10.
19. The Adventures of David Simple, ed. Linda Bree (London: Penguin, 2002), 115. The novel is subtitled “A Moral Romance,” in a possibly deliberate counterpoint to the subtitle of Joseph Andrews, “A Comic Romance.”
20. Brissenden notes in his edition of the novel that the play in question might have been Lillo’s The London Merchant, first produced at Drury Lane in 1731.
21. Critical commentary on this passage has tended to focus on what kind of participation Fielding solicits. In The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), Wolfgang Iser uses the episode to illustrate his argument about the reader’s creative role in “the realization of the text” (35). To the contrary, J. Paul Hunter argues that Fielding “refuses to allow us solitude for our confrontation with fictional worlds, as if he did not trust us on our own” (Occasional Form, 7). Jill Campbell (“Fielding’s Style,” English Literary History 72, no. 2 [Summer 2005], 407–28) notes that Fielding’s use of dashes to set off the digression serves both cognitive and dramatic functions—both marking phrases of thought and acting as performative cues for the translation of text into voice. For commentary on the relation between the deliberately ornate style of this passage and the putatively simpler mimetic idiom of Pamela, see Scott Black, “Anachronism and the Uses of Form in Joseph Andrews,” NOVEL:A Forum on Fiction 38, nos. 2–3 (Summer 2005), 150–51.
22. In a note to his edition of Joseph Andrews, Martin Battestin proposes several potential source texts: Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 3.418–19, Colley Cibber’s version of Shakespeare’s Richard III (IV.vii), Theobald’s Persian Princess (IV.ii), and Young’s Busiris (IV). More recently, Tom Keymer (“Joseph Andrews, Benjamin Martyn’s Timoleon, and the Statue of Surprize,” Notes and Queries 45, no. 4 [December 1998], 460–61) has traced the exact phrase to Benjamin Martyn’s Timoleon: A Tragedy (1730), in which the character of Timophanes, startled by his father’s ghost, is described as looking like “a very Statue of Surprize.”
23. Aaron Hill, An Essay on the Art of Acting (London: printed for J. Dixwell, 1779), 35, 39. For commentary on Hill’s ideas of performance and the eighteenth-century stage more generally, see Roach, The Player’s Passion, 79–86.
24. Both Lady Booby and Mrs. Slipslop are ridiculed for their affectations; and, as Jill Campbell has observed, Fielding tends to associate affectation with the feminine and the hypertheatrical. See Campbell, Natural Masques: Gender and Identity in Fielding’s Plays and Novels (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 25. Judith Frank (Common Ground: Eighteenth-Century English Satiric Fiction and the Poor [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997]) sees Slipslop’s verbal lapses and Fanny’s illiteracy as ways of keeping the two female servants in their place (54–55).
25. Simon Dickie, “Fielding’s Rape Jokes,” Review of English Studies, New Series, 61, no. 251 (2010), 588. See also Dickie, Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
26. Lynn Enterline observes in The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) that the Pygmalion story served as a pervasive legend for the power of art in the Renaissance; and the animation of a statue “offers an erotic version of a rhetorician’s dream” of moving an audience (203).
27. Aaron Hill, Elfrid: Or, the Fair Inconstant, A Tragedy as it is Acted at the Theatre Royal, by her Majesty’s Servants:To which is Added The Walking Statue: Or, the Devil in the Wine-Cellar. A Farce in One Act (London: printed for Bernard Lintott and Egbert Sanger, 1710).
28. Arthur Murphy made precisely this point: “I apprehend that the Ridiculous may be formed, where there is no Affectation at the Bottom, and…Parson Adams I take to be an Instance of this Assertion.” See Murphy, The Gray’s-Inn Journal No. 49, 31 August 1754, in Paulson and Lockwood, Henry Fielding, 375–76.
29. Stuart M. Tave, The Amiable Humorist:A Study in the Comic Theory and Criticism of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960).
30. For a thorough tracing of the Miltonic echoes in the two encounters with the Roasting Squire in the novel, see Campbell, Natural Masques, chap. 3. Campbell argues that allusions to the rebel angels’ physical and verbal assaults “offer a dark perspective on the ‘masculine’ exercise of satire in which the Roasting-Squire so delights” (108).
31. Simon Dickie, “Joseph Andrews and the Great Laughter Debate,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 34 (2005), 271–332.
32. Summarizing critical consensus, Ronald Paulson in The Life of Henry Fielding: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000) calls Adams “the first great comic hero of the English novel” (120), and an English Quixote figure. Paulson suggests that there is just enough ridiculousness and imprudence in Adams to save him from becoming an unreal paragon.
33. Battestin notes that Fielding became interested in deism in the 1730s when he associated with several prominent freethinkers, but he argues that the author later rejected their views. On the other hand, Ronald Paulson argues in his critical biography that Fielding never wholly abandoned deism and always saw Providence as a convenient fiction rather than a theological truth (112–14). For Battestin’s rejoinder, see “Fielding and the Deists,” in Eighteenth-Century Fiction 13, no. 1 (2000), 1–10. Alexander Welsh (Reflections on the Hero as Quixote [Prince ton: Prince ton University Press, 1981]) sees Fielding’s novel as allowing a glimpse of the possibility of random circumstance or life’s injustices that later novelists including Sterne and Diderot would more fully elaborate (106–7).
34. Henry Fielding, Miscellanies, vol. 1, ed. Henry Knight Miller (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1972).
35. In Preromanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), Marshall Brown observes that both Fielding and Sterne begin in forms of the picaresque: the former aims to “reinvest picaresque with artistic shape,” while the latter “both distills and reduces the old genres” (275).
36. Rather than characterizing Sterne as an antirealist, numerous critics have seen him as a kind of hyperrealist in the effort to represent the play of consciousness. See Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 290–91; Richard Lanham, “Tristram Shandy”:The Game of Pleasure (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 20; Brown, Preromanticism, 268; Elizabeth Kraft, Character and Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Comic Fiction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 100–101; and Patricia Meyer Spacks, Novel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 272.
37. Jonathan Lamb (Sterne’s Fiction and the Double Principle [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989]) identifies a “double principle” in the novel: the alignment of the time of writing the manuscript with the time of reading the book.
38. Thomas Keymer (Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002]) argues that Sterne wanted to make the opening chapters of Tristram Shandy “fashionably in the swim” (2). Rather than seeing Sterne’s techniques as proto-modernist anachronism, Keymer places them within an eighteenth-century context of formal experimentation.
39. For recent studies of Hume’s ideas as manifested in Sterne’s novel, see Christina Lupton, “Tristram Shandy, David Hume, and Epistemological Fiction,” Philosophy and Literature 27, no. 1 (April 2003), 98–115; and Jesse Molesworth, Chance and the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Realism, Probability, Magic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Lupton reads Sterne and Hume as engaged in similar literary-philosophical enterprises (99) and Molesworth sees him as expressing “the terrible acknowledgement that one’s life resembles nothing so much as a disor ga nized jumble of unconnected events” (171).
40. See Sermon 8, “Time and Chance,” in Laurence Sterne, The Sermons of Parson Yorick, 2 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1927), 1:96.
41. In The Beautiful, Novel, and Strange (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), Ronald Paulson has identified another Freudian process at work in Tristram Shandy: the sublimation of sexual drives into Hogarthian lines of beauty (168).
42. Sterne’s world is, as Ronald Paulson observed, a “homosocial” one characterized by “Shandean male bonding” (The Beautiful, Novel, and Strange, 164). In Po litical Constructions: Defoe, Richardson, and Sterne in Relation to Hobbes, Hume, and Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), Carol Kaye argues that such a world had a political valence: in retreating from Whig polemics into fiction, Sterne creates a model of polite conversation among men of diverse ideologies.
43. See Ross Hamilton, Accident:A Philosophical and Literary History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 152–58.
44. Toby’s attempts to explain his wound can be subsumed under a larger, more vexed enterprise that Ross King identifies in the novel—“the textual compensation for bodily loss.” See King, “Tristram Shandy and the Wound of Language,” Studies in Philology 92, no. 3 (Summer 1995), 293–94. Molesworth (Chance and the Eighteenth-Century Novel) points out that both Walter’s Tristapaedia and Tristram’s Life and Opinions can also be seen as textual compensations for accidental misfortunes (195).
45. For a consideration of Sterne’s idiosyncratic punctuation as form of mediation, see Roger B. Moss, “Sterne’s Punctuation,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 15, no. 2 (Winter 1981/82), 179–200. Moss notes that the dash “occupies real, linear space, the same route along which the reading eye is traveling, and so it can challenge narrative on its own ground” (195).
46. Brown (Preromanticism) suggests that Tristram Shandy represents a shift from the earlier novel’s “logic of knowledge” to a “logic of the soul”—a “drive toward emotional narrative” (262). Similarly, Molesworth (Chance and the Eighteenth-Century Novel) finds an “emotional intensity” in Sterne’s novel (192).
1. Jane Austen, Emma, ed. Fiona Stafford (London: Penguin, 2003), 213.
2. Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, ed. Ros Ballaster (London: Penguin, 1995), 62.
3. Samuel Johnson, “The Need for General Knowledge,” Rambler 137 (9 July 1751), in The Rambler, 3 vols., vol. 2, ed. W.J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 360.
4. In Todorov’s definition, the Fantastic is a narrative mode that hovers between magical awe and rational explanation. See Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975).
5. See D.A. Miller, Jane Austen, or the Secret of Style (Prince ton: Prince ton University Press, 2005). Miller distinguishes between Austen’s narrative style (impersonal, neuter, sourceless) and Fielding’s (personal, idiosyncratic, self-referential).
6. See Tave, Some Words of Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 37. For another lexical approach, see Norman Page, The Language of Jane Austen (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1972). Before Page and Tave, C.S. Lewis in “A Note on Jane Austen” (in Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Ian Watt [Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963], 25–34) observed the “hardness” and clarity of Austen’s moral vocabulary, which frames moments of “undeception” and “awakening” (27).
7. Tony Tanner, Jane Austen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 73.
8. Claudia Johnson, Jane Austen:Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 42. Before Johnson, Judith Wilt (Ghosts of the Gothic:Austen, Eliot, and Lawrence [Prince ton: Prince ton University Press, 1980]) argued that the result of Austen’s use of gothic machinery is “not to make romance ridiculous but to make common anxiety ‘serious’ or ‘high’” (126).
9. D.A. Miller, Narrative and Its Discontents (Prince ton: Prince ton University Press, 1981). Miller’s premise is that “The narrative of happiness is inevitably frustrated by the fact that only insufficiencies, defaults, deferrals can be ‘told’” (3).
10. A. Walton Litz (Jane Austen: A Study of Her Artistic Development [New York: Oxford University Press, 1965]) suggests that the chapters of literary burlesque (1–2 and 20–25) are “detachable units” that might not have been part of Austen’s original design; in any case, he argues that Austen’s techniques “never coalesce into a satisfactory whole” (59, 68).
11. Adam Phillips, On Flirtation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), xix.
12. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961), 42.
13. Marilyn Butler and A. Walton Litz, among others, have addressed changes in Austen’s narrative style; more recently, critics have studied changes in the author’s conception of time, memory, and consciousness. In Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004) William Deresiewicz attributes changing representations of time and memory to Austen’s exposure to British Romantic poetry; and in Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) Nicholas Dames places Austen’s novels in the context of cultural constructions of nostalgia and sanative forms of memory and forgetting. In British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) Alan Richardson argues for a “concurrence between Austen’s late style and emergent biological notions of the subject” (107).
14. In The Gothic Text (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), Marshall Brown sees a direct line between Fielding’s early use of what Dorrit Cohn has called “psycho-narration” and Walpole’s representations of interiority (23).
15. Brown remarks that Otranto reminds us that the novel cannot represent spectacle as well as drama can: “Narrative dissolves bodies and silences spectacle. Its analytic sequentiality compromises the hustle of the stage even though Walpole maintains the dramatic unity of time and the accompanying rapidity of action” (64).
16. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, ed. W.S. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). All quotations of the novel refer to this edition.
17. In this trend, as Cave notes in Recognitions:A Study in Poetics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), recognition scenes are construed to be about “mental states, duplicities of motive, hypocrisy, self-deception, delusion” (149). For a recent study of the psychological dimensions of the gothic, see Brown, The Gothic Text. Brown follows in a critical tradition that casts the gothic as forerunner of Freudian narrative, in its concern with taboo, nightmare, and psychic stress.
18. Connections between gothic fiction and philosophies of the sublime have become a critical commonplace. George Haggerty (Gothic Fiction/Gothic Form [University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989]) sees gothic fiction as reflecting a larger movement in eighteenth-century aesthetics: “the theoretical shift from the object to the subject in discussions of the sublime” (6); and Brown suggests that “the distance from the transcendental of the philosopher to the supernatural of the novelists is not necessarily so great” (The Gothic Text, 12).
19. By invoking Mikhail Bakhtin, I am interested mainly in how Walpole’s narrative allows for skepticism through its representation of multiple perspectives. For an approach to the gothic that applies Bakhtin’s idea of polyglossia to the effects of multiple frame narratives and presentational media, see Jacqueline Howard, Reading Gothic Fiction:A Bakhtinian Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
20. Among gothic authors, Radcliffe was unusual in providing rational explanations; as Karl Kroeber notes (Styles in Fictional Structure:The Art of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and George Eliot [Prince ton: Prince ton University Press, 1971]), she was criticized by Walter Scott for doing so (116).
21. Ann Radcliffe, The Italian, or The Confessional of the Black Penitents, ed. Robert Miles (London: Penguin, 2000), 70.
22. For a wide-ranging consideration of temporal dilation in the descriptive passages of eighteenth-century fiction, see Maximilian E. Novak, “The Extended Moment: Time, Dream, History, and Perspective in Eighteenth-Century Fiction,” in Probability,Time, and Space in Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. Paula R. Backscheider (New York: AMS Press, 1979),141–66. In realist narrative, putatively simple facts, objects, or events can be treated with sustained attention or dreamlike absorption; and Novak credits Defoe with pioneering this focal technique.
23. Samuel Johnson, “The Folly of Anticipating Misfortunes,” The Rambler 29 (1750), in The Rambler, vol. 1, ed. W.J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 159–60.
24. See Austen, Letters, 3rd ed., ed. Deirdre Le Faye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 18–19 December 1798.
25. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, ed. James Kinsley and John Davie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). All quotations refer to this edition.
26. Joseph Addison, Spectator 62 (11 May 1711).
27. For an account of novelistic mind reading that incorporates developments in cognitive science, see Lisa Zunshine, “Theory of Mind and Fictional Consciousness,” Narrative 11, no. 3 (October 2003), 270–91.
28. See Jerome Kagan, Surprise, Uncertainty, and Mental Structures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 5.
29. The idea of the “probable,” as Douglas Lane Patey has shown in Probability and Literary Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), played an important part in eighteenth-century thought: in Enlightenment philosophy, it denoted what is judged to conform to our knowledge and experience of the world; and in neoclassical literary criticism, it meant both faithful representation of reality and internal consistency or plausibility within a fictive frame. Mark Loveridge (“Northanger Abbey; Or, Nature and Probability,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 46, no. 1 [ June 1991], 1–29) sees Northanger Abbey as exploring the powers and limits of probabilistic thought.
30. “I want a hero,” Byron famously declares in Don Juan (I.i.1–4), using the term—as Austen uses it—in both literary and pedestrian senses: he announces a search for a worthy protagonist even as he laments the lack of real heroes in English public life. See Lord Byron, Don Juan, in Byron [Oxford Authors Series], ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
31. See Ruth Yeazell, Fictions of Modesty:Women and Courtship in the English Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 51. Before Yeazell, Mary Poovey investigated the cultural contradictions and strategies of indirection in conduct books and courtship narratives in The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Poovey articulates a conflict in eighteenth-century conduct books between bourgeois feminine accomplishment and modest self-effacement (29).
32. Jane Austen, Persuasion, ed. D.W. Harding (London: Penguin, 1985), 48. All quotations refer to this edition.
33. For a study of corporeal experience in the novel, see Kay Young’s article, “Feeling Embodied: Consciousness, Persuasion, and Jane Austen,” Narrative 11, no. 1 [January 2003], 78–92), which describes the reunion of Anne and Frederick as the experience of “feeling embodied together again,” and links that “consciousness of the pain of being alive” with Austen’s sense of her own mortality (89).
1. Quotations from Wordsworth’s shorter poetry refer to Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936). Quotations from The Prelude refer to the 1805 version in The Prelude:A Parallel Text, ed. J.C. Maxwell (London: Penguin, 1972, rpt. 1988).
2. Robert Langbaum first applied the idea of epiphany to Romantic lyric in The Poetry of Experience (New York: W.W. Norton, 1957, rpt. 1963), esp. 46–47. “Epiphany” named the salient feature of what he called the “poetry of experience”: the derivation of meaning from individual perception rather than a preexisting order of values or ideas. Langbaum later elaborated this model in “The Epiphanic Mode in Wordsworth and Modern Literature,” New Literary History 14, no. 2 (Winter 1983), 335–58. Ashton Nichols explores the topic in The Poetics of Epiphany (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1987). In Natural Supernaturalism:Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W.W. Norton, 1971), M.H. Abrams links “the Romantic moment” with the Paterian moment of aesthetic intensity and the Modernist epiphany, but he never describes the Wordsworthian spot of time as an epiphany per se. In “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric” (in Sensibility to Romanticism, ed. Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965]), Abrams examines the poetic structuring of experience around a climactic realization, but he describes this moment more broadly as an insight, a confrontation with loss, a moral decision, or an emotional resolution.
3. Langbaum, “The Epiphanic Mode,” 350, 352–53.
4. See Paul Fry, “Clearings in the Way: Non-epiphany in Wordsworth,” in A Defense of Poetry: Reflections on the Occasion of Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). This essay first appeared in Studies in Romanticism 31, no. 1 (Spring 1992), 3–19. The naming of “ostension” as central to literary mimesis is part of Fry’s attempt to get beyond traditional accounts of the occasion of writing as either sensuous pleasure (aesthesis) or Kantian sublimity (“astonishment disclosing transcendental reason to itself”).
5. Hartman has discussed the epiphanic style and its relation to trauma in Wordsworth’s poetry in an interview with Cathy Caruth conducted in 1994. See “An Interview with Geoffrey Hartman,” in The Wordsworthian Enlightenment: Romantic Poetry and the Ecol ogy of Reading, ed. Helen Regueiero Elam and Frances Ferguson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 306.
6. See Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). Hartman describes Romantic lyric as “a development of surmise” (11), and he sees Wordsworth’s trope of halting as an imaginative template (17–18).
7. William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800) The Prose Works, 3 vols., ed. W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974) 1:128–30.
8. The Poems of Alexander Pope [the Twickenham text], ed. John Butt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963).
9. To Aaron Hill, 12 July 1749, in Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson, ed. John Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), 171.
10. See James Boswell, Life of Johnson, 2.173–75, 5 April 1772 (439).
11. Wordsworth twice invokes a phrase from Othello (1.3.135) in disavowing any narrative interest or proficiency in delivering surprising adventures. In “The Ruined Cottage,” the Pedlar says that his “common tale” is “By moving accidents uncharactered” (232); and in “Hart-Leap Well,” the narrator announces, “The moving accident is not my trade” (97).
12. Hartman sees “Strange Fits” as exemplifying a new kind of poetry “in which the passion driving the passion narrative need not be related to the heavens or cataclysm but is as ‘ordinary’ as mind itself: its everyday, imaginative responses to the natural world.” See “The Psycho-Aesthetics of Romantic Moonshine: Wordsworth’s Profane Illumination,” Wordsworth Circle 37, no. 1 [Winter 2006], 12.
13. The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. Stuart Curran (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
14. See Wimsatt, “One Relation of Rhyme to Reason,” in The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954).
15. In “The Language of Paradox,” the opening essay in The Well Wrought Urn, Brooks uses the “Westminster Bridge” sonnet as illustration of “the Romantic preoccupation with wonder—the surprise, the revelation which puts the tarnished familiar world in a new light” (7). He suggests that “the structure of the poem resembles that of a play” later in the book, in his essay, “The Heresy of Paraphrase” (186).
16. It is easy to see why Metaphysical poetry in particular appealed to Brooks, for its qualities of theatricality and wordplay offered ample illustration of his argument. Indeed, Brooks’s critical premises hark back to Renaissance poetics. As James Biester (Lyric Wonder: Rhetoric and Wit in Re nais sance English Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997) has shown, the early modern fascination with states of wonder and awe can be seen in commentary on poetry and rhetoric—in an emphasis on the surprise of paradox or riddle, and the sudden illumination of an unexpected metaphor.
17. Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Literary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 224–25.
18. For a study of the ways that Wordsworth and Coleridge strategically distanced themselves from gothic modes, see Michael Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), esp. chap. 3, on the Lyrical Ballads. In Gamer’s argument, neither poet could truly renounce the imaginative resources of the gothic, so both attacked reading predilections associated with it instead (103).
19. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, ed. W.S. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 29.
20. See Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Philips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
21. In his reading of “The Solitary Reaper,” Hartman notes a “doubled shock”—the initial surprise of the Highland girl’s song followed by a pensive “inward sinking” (Wordsworth’s Poetry, 7).
22. For a consideration of the word “unawares” in the Boy of Winander episode, “Resolution and In de pen dence,” and “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” see Steven Lukits, “Wordsworth Unawares,” Wordsworth Circle 19, no. 3 (Summer 1988), 156–60.
23. Adam Phillips, “On Being Bored,” in On Kissing,Tickling, and Being Bored (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 68–69.
24. Paul de Man, “Wordsworth and Hölderlin,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 54.
25. As Duncan Wu suggests in Wordsworth’s Reading, 1770–1799 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), the poet had likely first encountered Tristram Shandy at Hawkshead (132–33) but reacquainted himself with it in adult life. In a letter of 1791, he claims to have read only three volumes of the novel (EY 56); but in 1796, Dorothy reports that she has read it entire, and her brother probably shared that pleasure with her.
26. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Melvyn New and Joan New (London: Penguin, 2003), 4.27.286.
27. Adam Potkay has placed “Surprised by Joy” within a rich intellectual history of joy. See The Story of Joy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). For earlier readings of the poem, see David Ferry, The Limits of Mortality (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1959), 64–65; and Carl Woodring, Wordsworth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 171–72. Though both Woodring and Ferry articulate the element of guilt in the poem, neither critic sufficiently appreciates the resonance of the word “surprise.” The feeling of being “surprised by joy” is not purely (as Woodring puts it) “exultation at the sudden discovery of something deeply pleasing” (171–72).
28. The circumstances surrounding Catherine’s death are recounted in Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth:A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 286.
29. See Sidney, An Apology for Poetry and Astrophil and Stella:Texts and Contexts, ed. Peter C. Herman (Glen Allen, VA: College Publishing, 2001),128. Wordsworth certainly admired Sidney’s sonnets, as his homage attests: a sonnet published in 1807 begins with Sidney’s own lines from Sonnet 31, “With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climbst the sky, / How silently, and with how wan a face!” (1–2), 145.
30. These quotations come from the following poems: “At Applethwaite, Near Keswick” (1804, pub. 1842); “To the Memory of Raisley Calvert” (pub. 1807); “To Sleep”; “Hail, Twilight, sovereign of one peaceful hour!” (pub. 1815); “To the Lady Mary Lowther” (pub. 1820); “Brook! whose society the Poet seeks…” (1806, pub. 1815); “To B.R. Haydon” (1831, pub. 1832); “Composed near Calais…” (1802, pub. 1807); “London, 1802” (1802, pub. 1807); “En gland! the time is come” (1803, pub. 1807); and “The Oak of Guernica” (1810, pub. 1815).
31. This poem, simply entitled, “November, 1836,” is collected under the heading, “Miscellaneous Sonnets.”
32. C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1955), 160. In Lewis’s memoir, “surprise” becomes almost synonymous with spiritual conversion. Lewis reads Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode as a expressing a tragically unredeemed sense of loss, but from the perspective of his Christian awakening, he cannot subscribe to the notion that a visionary gleam can ever definitively pass away (224).
33. Philip Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 20. Wittgenstein, Fisher notes, raised this issue when he asked in his Brown Notebook, “What does the ordinary feel like? Is it a feeling at all?” By implication, the feeling of surprise contrastively distinguishes the ordinary.
34. Brooks reads Wordsworth’s “Westminster Bridge” sonnet as a poem about the speaker’s “awed surprise” in discovering the beauty of an urban landscape where he expected to find none (The Well-Wrought Urn, 6). Brooks subsumes that feeling under his or ga niz ing concept of paradox, a major form of which is simply the discovery of the extraordinary in the ordinary.
1. John Keats, Letters, ed. Robert Gittings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970, rpt. 1992). To Benjamin Bailey, 22 November 1817. Keats begins the letter by counseling his friend to adopt a stoic stance toward the ways of the world: “What occasions the greater part of the World’s Quarrels? simply this, two Minds meet and do not understand each other time enough to p[r]aevent any shock or surprise at the conduct of either party.” All quotations of Keats’s correspondence refer to this edition.…
2. To John Taylor, 27 February 1818.
3. See Alexander Pope, “Essay on Criticism” (249–50), in The Poems of Alexander Pope [the Twickenham text], ed. John Butt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963).
4. To John Hamilton Reynolds, 7, 8 April 1817.
5. Stuart Sperry remarks in Keats the Poet (Prince ton: Prince ton University Press, 1973) that “the best of the early verse is characterized by the sudden start of surprise or recognition” (6). Stuart Ende in Keats and the Sublime (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976) finds a recurring trope of recognition and renewal in Keats’ poetry. One emotional ramification of surprise is embarrassment, which Christopher Ricks in Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974) has identified as the affective and moral coloring of Keats’s poetry.
6. Paul Ricoeur’s threefold definition of recognition offers further clarification: 1) to grasp an object through thought and to know it by memory; 2) to accept something as true; and 3) to bear witness of gratitude, as in acknowledging an indebtedness or attesting an abiding faith. See The Course of Recognition, trans. David Pellauer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 12.
7. Helen Vendler has argued that Keats works in each ode to mask or reorder its “experiential beginning,” and that each affords a glimpse of what inspired it. See Vendler, “The Experiential Beginnings of Keats’s Odes,” Studies in Romanticism 12, no. 30 (Summer 1973), 591–606. The seeds of this essay would eventually become The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), which offered “conjectural reconstruction of the odes as they are invented, imagined put in sequence, and revised” (3).
8. To John Hamilton Reynolds, 3 February 1818.
9. To George and Tom Keats, 21, 27(?) December 1817. Though Keats professes to reject startlement for its own sake, Karen Swann sees something like that form of excess at work in Endymion. See Swann, “Endymion’s Beautiful Dreamers,” in The Cambridge Companion to Keats, ed. Susan J. Wolfson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 28.
10. William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), in Prose Works, ed. W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974).
11. Hermione de Almeida, Romantic Medicine and John Keats (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 69. John Brown saw in the cycle of excitation and exhaustion a tendency in all creatures toward dissolution, an inertial momentum which could be only temporarily halted by outside forces, and he saw life itself as a “forced state.”
12. Keats suggests that his presumption lies in following the path of Leigh Hunt, whose Spenserian Story of Rimini had recently been published. It is odd to suggest that Spenser would be taken aback by Keats’s desire to rival Hunt rather than Spenser himself. The suggestion seems both a sincere compliment to and a playful jousting with an early mentor; but in the retrospect of Keats’s career, it also raises the possibility that there might be too many poets crowding the path to Spenserian glory, and that another course might be more worth pursuing.
13. John Keats, Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). All quotations of Keats’s poetry refer to this edition.
14. The Keats Circle, vol. 1, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), 94.
15. To the George Keatses, 14–31 October 1818.
16. Ricks (Keats and Embarrassment) has suggested that “the delicate humanity of the letter comes out of embarrassment,” particularly the awkwardness of the near-kiss (220).
17. The poems that Keats wrote on his northern walking tour in the summer of 1818 necessarily record first experiences (e.g., “On Visiting the Tomb of Burns”), but they reflect a growing disenchantment with touristic reportage, with its constant readiness to be amazed. The doggerel poem, “There was a naughty boy,” which Keats sent to his sister, comically registers this feeling.
18. This indirection might be described, in Vendler’s terms, as the effect of abstract thought supervening upon the actual; but it can also be seen as a specialized case of Keatsian surprise, with its mixture of the startling and the familiar.
19. In Coming of Age as a Poet (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), Helen Vendler sees this poem as “perfecting” Keats’s earlier labors in the sonnet form, and the sign of a new poetic maturity (55).
20. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. David Scott Kastan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2005), 2.750–52.
21. For a reading that places the poem within the ekphrastic tradition and the contemporary dialogue surrounding the Elgin Marbles, see Grant F. Scott, The Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis, and the Visual Arts (Hanover, NJ: University Press of New En gland, 1994). Scott remarks that the poem “transforms the traditional ekphrastic impulse to narrate the artwork into a desire to narrate the self watching the artwork” (45).
22. To Benjamin Bailey, 23 January 1818.
23. Walter Jackson Bate discusses the circumstances of Keats’s writing of the poem in John Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 285–86.
24. John L. Waltman discusses Hunt’s collection in “‘And Beauty Draws Us With a Single Hair’: Leigh Hunt as Collector,” Keats-Shelley Memorial Association Bulletin [Keats-Shelley Review] 31 (1980), 61–67. In addition to the samples from Milton, Swift, and Johnson, Hunt acquired locks from Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Percy and Mary Shelley, Lamb, Carlyle, Hazlitt, and the Brownings, as well as Napoleon and George Washington. Each specimen was mounted on a leaf opposite a print depicting the original bearer and kept in an envelope containing the name and details of acquisition.
25. Susan Stewart, On Longing (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 155. For a study of Romantic-era collecting, see Judith Pascoe, The Hummingbird Cabinet:A Rare and Curious History of Romantic Collectors (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006). Pascoe sees the Romantic fascination with collections as reflecting an acute awareness of the necessarily incomplete recovery of history.
26. The Selected Writings of Leigh Hunt, ed. John Strachan (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003), 5:232. Hunt’s three sonnets are respectively titled “To——, M. D., On his giving me a lock of Milton’s hair,” “To the Same on the Same Subject,” and “To the Same on the Same Occasion.” The second in the series, the octave of which is quoted here, is the one that became known as “On a lock of Milton’s hair” from 1832 onward.…
27. Motion, Keats (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), 225.
28. The “Ode to Psyche” is one of two odes that Vendler excludes from her essay on experiential beginnings (“Indolence” is the other), because its origin is a “self-induced” vision of two mythical creatures (592).
29. For a detailed consideration of the poem’s structures of recapitulation, see Vendler’s reading of the ode in The Odes of John Keats. Vendler argues that the ode “declares, by its words and by its shape, that the creation of art requires the complete replacement of all memory and sense-experience by an entire duplication of the external world within the artist’s brain” (49).
30. To Benjamin Bailey, 21, 25 May 1818.
31. Despite her speculation about experiential origins, Vendler allows that if Melancholy is actually “intrinsic to life,” then the poet doesn’t need the mistress’s rage as precipitant (597).
32. David Bromwich (“Keats and the Aesthetic Ideal,” in The Per sis tence of Poetry: Bicentennial Essays on Keats, ed. Robert M. Ryan and Ronald M. Sharp [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998], 183–188) has suggested that in Keats’s poetry, sensations are “neither enjoyed nor suffered, but rather are absorbed for the sake of self-concentration or an intensification that changes their character” (185).
33. To Benjamin Bailey, 22 November 1817.
34. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 1991), 33.
1. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience,” Essays: First and Second Series (New York: Vintage Books/Library of America, 1990), 253.
2. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, ed. Charlotte Mitchell (London: Penguin, 1996), 4.
3. Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1977), 175.
4. See A Tale of Two Cities, ed. Richard Maxwell (London: Penguin, 2003), 134.…
5. See Bleak House, ed. J. Hillis Miller (London: Penguin, 1971), 720–21.…
6. See Roland Greene, Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 9–10. Greene coins the phrase “conceptual envelope” to describe what happens when “a phenomenon known through direct experience moves within several intersecting planes of received knowledge.”
7. See Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New (New York: Knopf, 1980, 1991). Hughes tells a story of modern art that emphasizes challenges to familiar ways of seeing, but he also insists that even as some developments became conventional, they have retained their power to shock, even on repeated viewings. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), for instance, “is still a disturbing painting…a refutation of the idea that the surprise of art, like the surprise of fashion, must necessarily wear off” (21).
8. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961), 33.
9. Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past,” in Moments of Being, 2nd ed., ed. Jeanne Schulkind (New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1985), 72.
10. Henry James, The Princess Casamassima, ed. Derek Brewer (London: Penguin, 1987), 33.
11. Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent, ed. Roger Tennant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), xxxiii.
12. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 175, 163. “Of all the experiences which made his life what it was, Baudelaire singled out his having been jostled by the crowd as the decisive, unique experience” (193).
13. “The greater the share of the shock factor in particular impressions,” Benjamin (“On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”) notes in Freudian terms, “the more constantly consciousness has to be alert as a screen against stimuli, the more efficiently it does so, the less do these impressions enter experience (Erfahrung), tending to remain in the sphere of a certain hour of one’s life (Erlebnis)” (163). This is a political as well as aesthetic caveat, in that Benjamin makes a Marxist connection between the urban crowd and the modern factory: “The shock-experience which the passer-by has in the crowd corresponds to what the worker ‘experiences’ at his new machine” (176).
14. Franco Moretti, “Homo Palpitans,” in Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs, and David Miller (London: NLB, 1983), 116.
15. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 3.
16. See Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84–258.