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- Title
Jane Austen's Aesthetics and Ethics of Surprise.
- Authors
Miller, Christopher R.
- Abstract
In a memorable scene from the book "Joseph Andrews," Henry Fielding likens Lady Booby, sexually rebuffed by her virtuous servant, to 'the statue of surprize' spoken of by poets. Presumably, he invokes an old metaphor of astonished or fearful people as petrified, but the ambiguity of his phrase raises the possibility of a sculpture fashioned to represent an allegorical figure named 'Surprize.' If such a deity did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it as the presiding spirit of the eighteenth-century novel, an emergent genre that signally promised to exceed the reader's expectations, as well as the equally new discourse of aesthetics, which adopted surprise as a key term in the emotional lexicon of artistic experience. The full title of Robinson Crusoe's narrative, to cite only one example, advertises the wayward sailor's "Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures," the adjective of the new modifying an old signifier of romance. Defoe's title indicates both the strangeness and veracity of the narrator's experiences: real rather than fantastical, and thus all the more surprising; or, in Michael McKeon's formula for the epistemology of seventeenth-century news ballads and early novels, 'strange, therefore true.'
- Subjects
AESTHETICS; SURPRISE in literature; PHILOSOPHY; JOSEPH Andrews (Book : Fielding); ETHICS; LITERATURE
- Publication
Narrative, 2005, Vol 13, Issue 3, p238
- ISSN
1063-3685
- Publication type
Literary Criticism
- DOI
10.1353/nar.2005.0021