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. This book studies that change as it took shape in literature ranging from Paradise Lost through the novels of Jane Austen. The book argues that writers of the period exploited and arbitrated t ... More

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. This book studies that change as it took shape in literature ranging from Paradise Lost through the novels of Jane Austen. The book argues that writers of the period exploited and arbitrated the dual nature of surprise in its sinister and benign forms. It traces an intellectual history of surprise, offering a fresh reading of what it means to be “surprised by sin” in Paradise Lost, showing how John Milton's epic 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 Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Laurence Sterne, as well as in the poetry of William Wordsworth and John Keats. By focusing on surprise in its inflections as emotion, cognition, and event, the book illuminates connections between allegory and formal realism, between prose fiction and the discourse of aesthetics, and between novel and lyric.