Surprise: The Poetics of the Unexpected from Milton to Austen

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 naïveté, 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.

Table of Contents:
Introduction1. From Aristotle to Emotion Theory2. Being and Feeling: The Surprise Attacks of Paradise Lost3. The Accidental Doctor: Physics and Metaphysics in Robinson Crusoe4. The Purification of Surprise in Pamela5. Fielding's Statues of Surprize6. Northanger Abbey and Gothic Perception: Austen's Aesthetics and Ethics of Surprise7. Wordsworthian Shocks, Gentle and Otherwise8. "Fine Suddenness": Keats's Sense of a BeginningEpilogue Notes Index

About the Author :
Christopher R. Miller is Associate Professor of English at the College of Staten Island (CUNY). He is the author of The Invention of Evening: Perception and Time in Romantic Poetry.

Review :
This study of surprise, providing new perspectives on familiar and much-discussed literary works of seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century England, supplies abundant pleasant surprises of its own. Its complicated history of a commonplace word and of the concepts it engages powerfully supports Christopher Miller's investigation into the emotional life of poetry and fiction.Surprise instructs, delights, and provokes further thought. It is an important achievement.... To think about how the claims ofSurprise might expand provides a way to acknowledge the book's importance. Its intricate argument, revealing a subtle and capacious intelligence, illuminates all it touches. - Patricia Meyer Spacks (Review 19) By the end of this book, one is amazed, astonished, thunder-struck, by the long hiostory of this emotiona's centrality to our understanding of psychological experience and the experience of literature. - Adela Pinch (Modern Philology (114.4)) Placing Austen in the context of a longer literary tradition, Christopher Miller's book, Surprise: The Poetics of the Unexpected from Milton to Austen, very clearly defines an area that has until now been overlooked by the affective turn in history and literary criticism. Miller's approach consistently sheds new light on canonical texts, occasionally supplementing more oblique examples with more readily apparent instances from lesser-known contemporary works. An engaging and very wide-ranging study, Surprise takes into account not only the kinds of experiences that might be thought surprising in various historical and literary contexts, but also the struggles of writers to depict their characters' surprise and to surprise their readers. It offers new ways of reading... while it sheds new light on texts that we might have thought incapable of surprising us still. - Olivia Murphy (European Romantic Review) Surprise is a refreshing, thoughtful study that offers insight into the aesthetics of surprise as it developed and changed over the course of the long eighteenth century. Miller's significant text will surely be referenced for many years to come. Those interested in the relationship between aesthetic discourse and the fiction of the period are strongly encouraged to read this important work. - Joel T. Terranova, University of Louisiana (Eighteenth-Century Fiction)