In the early nineteenth century, honor and disrepute were increasingly synonymous with terms like credit and debt. In Austen’s Emma, credit becomes a primary figure for the broader speculations about the inhabitants of Highbury. Long affiliated with a Whiggish ideology of commerce and its supposed levelling effects, credit, in Austen’s representation, turns out to be an elitist phenomenon, something made available only to those who already have honor, members of a “neofeudal” vanguard such as George Knightley, who can distribute credit at their discretion. However, Scott’s Rob Roy seems to rebuff Austen’s approach to credit and honor. Featuring a young protagonist who throws himself into the 1715 Jacobite uprising, rescues errant bills of credit from his father’s stock-brokerage, redeems family honor, and tries to impress his love interest, the novel at first appears to be an ideal neofeudal text, blending chivalric romance with modern commerce. But Rob Roy himself challenges the merger of these two paradigms. By decoupling honor from credit and disrupting the financialization of social value, the highlander becomes an unlikely scourge of incipient global finance capitalism.

Chapter 6, “Emma and Other Minds,” discusses Austin’s critique of certainty in “Other Minds,” and his account of the pluralities of verbal action in the essays “Pretending” and “A Plea for Excuses.” Austin’s arguments in these essays possess not only cognitive and epistemological dimensions; they are supremely rich investigations of moral thought and sociality: dimensions of life that produce endless opportunity for mistake. Illuminating Austen’s Emma, Austin’s rejection of the exclusive dimension of certainty driving so much modern theory of knowledge goes hand in hand with his recognition of the epistemological character of social responsibility. The novel’s famous scene at Box Hill enacts these dynamics in a tour de force of recursive layers. The ordinary-language philosophical topics treated in this chapter include moral luck, pretending, and the self-problematizing division (made famous by Paul de Man’s reading of Rousseau) between exculpatory confessions and pleasure-taking excuses. The chapter begins with Austin’s and Austen’s joint critique of certainty. It ends by dislodging omniscience as a placeholder of philosophical value.

This chapter presents another extension of the core model: an eye-movement control system is integrated with the parsing architecture, and this extended model is investigated using benchmark eyetracking data (the Potsdam Sentence Corpus).

Chapter 1 puts Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne in conversation with Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village and Jane Austen’s Emma. White’s natural history is the seminal text of English reverent natural history, establishing for much of the nineteenth century a model for reverent observation of the ordinary and local natural world. The chapter considers the formal commonalities and broad theoretical underpinnings of a naturalist, a novelist, and a sketch/prose artist. These three genres – reverent natural history, sketch narrative, novel of English provincial realism – offer sustained and reverent attention to the everyday aspects of their natural and social ecologies. Divided into three sections, the chapter considers White, Mitford, and Austen on their own terms, but also as modes of English realism, with Emma as an important predecessor the mid-nineteenth century novels of English provincial realism.