Surprise

R. Miller Christopher

Description

Today, in the era of the spoiler alert, "surprise" in fiction is primarily associated with an unexpected plot twist, but in earlier usage, the word had darker and more complex meanings. Originally denoting a military ambush or physical assault, surprise went through a major semantic shift in the eighteenth century: from violent attack to pleasurable experience, and from external event to internal feeling. In Surprise, Christopher R. Miller studies that change as it took shape in literature ranging from Paradise Lost through the novels of Jane Austen. Miller argues that writers of the period exploited and arbitrated the dual nature of surprise in its sinister and benign forms. Even as surprise came to be associated with pleasure, it continued to be perceived as a problem: a sign of ignorance or naivete, an uncontrollable reflex, a paralysis of rationality, and an experience of mere novelty or diversion for its own sake. In close readings of exemplary scenes-particularly those involving astonished or petrified characters-Miller shows how novelists sought to harness the energies of surprise toward edifying or comic ends, while registering its underpinnings in violence and mortal danger. In the Roman poet Horace's famous axiom, poetry should instruct and delight, but in the early eighteenth century, Joseph Addison signally amended that formula to suggest that the imaginative arts should surprise and delight. Investigating the significance of that substitution, Miller traces an intellectual history of surprise, involving Aristotelian poetics, Cartesian philosophy, Enlightenment concepts of the passions, eighteenth-century literary criticism and aesthetics, and modern emotion theory. Miller goes on to offer a fresh reading of what it means to be "surprised by sin" in Paradise Lost, showing how Milton's epic both harks back to the symbolic functions of violence in allegory and looks ahead to the moral contours of the novel. Subsequent chapters study the Miltonic ramifications of surprise in the novels of Defoe, Haywood, Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne, as well as in the poems of Wordsworth and Keats. By focusing on surprise in its inflections as emotion, cognition, and event, Miller's book illuminates connections between allegory and formal realism, between aesthetic discourse and prose fiction, and between novel and lyric; and it offers new ways of thinking about the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of the novel as the genre emerged in the eighteenth century.

Sujets

• Idioma inglés
• Reino Unido
• Literary theory
• United Kingdom
• English
• Great Britain
• Anglais
• Royaume-Uni

Informations

• Publié par: Cornell University Press
• Date de parution: 25 septembre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780801455780
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

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SURPRISE

T HE POE T I CS OF T HE UNE XPECT E D F ROM MI LTON TO AUST E N

C h r i s to p h e r R . M i l l e r

CORNELL UNIVERSITY Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2015 by Cornell University

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.

First published 2015 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Miller, Christopher R., 1968– author.  Surprise : the poetics of the unexpected from Milton to Austen / Christopher R. Miller.  pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8014-5369-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Surprise in literature. 2. English literature—18th century—History and criticism. I. Title.

PR448.S87M55 2015 820.9'353—dc23

2014030634

Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu.

Cloth printing

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Acknowledgments vii

 Introduction 1. From Aristotle to Emotion Theory 2. Being and Feeling: The Surprise Attacks ofParadise Lost 3. The Accidental Doctor: Physics and Metaphysics inRobinson Crusoe 4. The Purification of Surprise in Pamela 5. Fielding’s Statues of Surprize 6.Northanger Abbeyand Gothic Perception: Austen’s Aesthetics and Ethics of Surprise 7. Wordsworthian Shocks, Gentle and Otherwise 8. “Fine Suddenness”: Keats’s Sense of a Beginning Epilogue

Notes 233 Index 267

1 16

38

63

89 115

141

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199 223

c A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

It is no exaggeration to say that the earliest idea for this book took me by surprise. Until I taught a seminar on eighteenth-century British literature at Yale in the spring of 2004, I had considered myself a specialist in Romantic poetry, but in re-reading the novels of Richardson, Fielding, and Austen, I became interested in a new— but not entirely unrelated—field and set of critical questions. I am grateful to have had so many smart and companionable colleagues during the early phases of this exploration: Nigel Alderman, David Bromwich, Bill Deresie- wicz, Roberta Frank, Ann Gaylin, Priscilla Gilman, Sara Suleri Goodyear, Lanny Hammer, Blair Hoxby, Larry Manley, Stefanie Markovits, Tom Otten, Claude Rawson, Nicole Rice, Joe Roach, Blakey Vermeule, Elliott Visconsi, and Sandy Welsh. I owe particular debts of gratitude to Leslie Brisman for being a mentor and a mensch in every way; to David Quint and John Rogers for their wise and generous counsel on my Milton chapter; to Nigel Alderman, for his shared passion for Wordsworth’s poetry and his own compelling interpreta- tion of “Two April Mornings”; to Marshall Brown, David Kastan, Charles Rzepka, and Jayne Lewis for their friendly interest and encouragement; and to Gabrielle Starr for being an ideal reader and interlocutor since graduate school. Several of the people I’ve mentioned (they know who they are) offered invaluable moral support during a difficult time. I must also thank several early mentors whose genial influence is implicit in these pages: Jim Engell, who introduced me to the field of eighteenth-century studies; Phil Fisher, who taught me how to read novels; and Helen Vendler, who taught me how to read poems. In more recent years, I have been fortunate in my colleagues at the Col- lege of Staten Island, including Ashley Dawson, Alyson Bardsley, Cate Mar- vin, Steve Monte, Maryann Feola, Katie Goodland, and Lee Papa. This book was written during the past eight years without sabbatical or academic fel- lowship, but I count myself lucky to have enjoyed the good fellowship of

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

friends outside of academia, particularly John Harpole, Ted Loos, David Matias, and Fred Mogul. I would also like to thank the English departments at Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, and Wesleyan for opportunities to present my work and for the stimulating conversation that ensued. This book contains some previously published material, and it appears herewithpermission:Chapter6includesportionsof“JaneAusten’sAes- thetics and Ethics of Surprise,”Narrative(October 2005), 239–61; Chapter 7 includes portions of “Wordsworth’s Anatomies of Surprise,”Studies in Ro- manticism(Winter 2007), 409–31; and Chapter 8 includes portions of 46 “Fine Suddenness: Keats’s Sense of a Beginning,” inSomething Understood, ed. Stephen Burt and Nick Halpern (University of Virginia Press, 2009). I am grateful to several editors for the opportunity to publish my earliest work in these venues—Jim Phelan, David Wagenknecht, Steve Burt, and Nick Halpern—and to Peter Potter at Cornell, who has been a patient and dedicated advocate of this project. Finally, this book is immeasurably better for the rigorous but fair-minded criticism it received from an anonymous reader for the press. Narrative surprises are often saved for last, but in the case of an Ac- knowledgements page, it can come as no surprise that my ultimate thanks are reserved for beloved family members: Bob and Karen Miller, Rob Miller, Sam and Lillian Friedman, and Aimee Friedman. Finally, deepest gratitude to my wife Natalie Friedman and my children Noah and Margot, all of whom have given me “surprize and delight” in the best possible eighteenth- century sense.

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