“Surprised and Not Surprised:” Varieties of Astonishment in Austen’s Novels

Christopher R. Miller

FULL TEXT

ABSTRACT (en)

This article explores the ways in which Jane Austen repurposed the eighteenth-century idiom of surprise and shock. Aside from a few scandalous revelations that hark back to eighteenth-century narrative données, Austen’s novels are not designed to deliver major surprises to the reader, and none of their heroines is subject to the kind of physical assaults visited upon Pamela and Evelina. Nevertheless, Austen’s characters frequently express feelings of surprise and shock: such statements typically serve more as vehicles of moral or social judgment than as spontaneous responses to the sudden. Rather than narrating surprising events, Austen is interested in what might be called the sociolinguistics of surprise. The article concludes with a consideration of Austen’s poetics of shock. In her early novel Northanger Abbey, Austen mimicked the obvious jump-scares of Gothic novels; this article shows how she went on to borrow from their perceptual and affective syntax in her later novels.

KEYWORDS (en)

surprise, shock, emotion, Gothic, narrative, poetics, trauma

DOI

https://doi.org/10.14712/2571452X.2025.69.10

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