Austen's scale-making.

Lee, Yoon Sun

TWO INCHES OF IVORY MAY BE THE BEST-KNOWN METAPHOR FOR Austen's novel-writing. (1) Compare to that modest figure "the totality of national life in its complex interaction between 'above' and 'below.'" This is what Georg Lukacs sees in Scott's Waverley Novels. Lukacs's favorite adjective for Scott's novels is "broad." Scott offers "the broad delineation of manners and circumstances attendant upon events ... broad, objective, epic form." (2) Not only broad but deep, able to reveal the full vertical sweep from base to superstructure. In comparison, two inches of ivory might seem to possess only surface and smallness.

Novels are inseparable from questions of scale, as Austen and Scott knew. In his review of Emma for the October 1815 Quarterly, Scott suggests that the modern novel shows the reader nothing "more interesting and extraordinary than those [incidents] which occur in his own life, or that of his next-door neighbours," offering "a correct and striking representation of that which is daily taking place around him." (3) Daily frequency and spatial circumscription are the measures that he uses to characterize the representational domain of the Austen-type novel. Positing "concentric circles of probability and possibility," Scott explains that, while earlier novels had hovered between the outer and inner circles, Austen chooses to remain within the inner ring of probability, which is only as wide as your own neighborhood, or what you can see from your own window. (4) In his first novel, published the year before, Scott sizes up his own project differently. Scotland's dramatic alteration provides the occasion for Waverley's writing, as well as its subject. "There is no European nation which, within the course of half a century ... has undergone so complete a change as this kingdom of Scotland." Waverley, like all of Scott's novels, takes on nations, centuries, and large-scale transformations. But it, too, is concerned with imposing measures on lived experience to enable its abstraction. In a well-known passage, Scott likens his novel's function to that of an artificial marker for measuring distance: "like those who drift down the stream of a deep and smooth river, we are not aware of the progress we have made until we fix our eye on the now-distant point from which we set out." (5)

Rather than assuming that novels are themselves large-scale, small-scale, or somewhere in between, this article will consider them as "scale-making projects." I borrow this phrase from anthropologist Anna Tsing, who shows how projects "that [make] us imagine globality ... locality, or the space of regions or nations" have become essential to steering the flows of global finance capital. (6) Tsing defines scale as "the spatial dimensionality necessary for a particular kind of view"; as she points out, "scale must be brought into being: proposed, practiced, and evaded." (7) Scale-making in the novel, I will argue, involves more than the representation of geographical space, cultural location, or even historical specificity. We can think of it as the act of representing the conditions of referentiality. The modern novel does of course refer to actual locations, subtly connecting them to a more primordial way of thinking about the space-story relationship, as Franco Moretti has shown. In this way, Austen and Scott bring into being an intimate sense of the nation as a certain kind of space: a "middle-sized world," in Austen's case, or one striated by internal boundaries, in Scott's. (8)

But beyond establishing relative spatial size or connection, the type of scale-making I will examine is the activity that allows actions, events, or perceptions of any type to be coordinated within a time or space. It handles time as a dimension of intersubjective action. Scale-making permits characters to anticipate, calculate, or perform movements, to occupy positions in space and identities over time. Scale-making is certainly part of the representational or imaginary infrastructure of empire, but not in the ways we have become accustomed to looking for in the context of the novel. As an activity it is closer to what Arjun Appadurai describes as the function of quantification in the colonial British rule of India. (9) But the novel's scale-making doesn't measure what's there so much as it lays the basis for the represented experience of space and time at an almost primordial level. It connects time and space with the gestures and movements of the body and of the mind, rather than with geographical or geopolitical formations. In this radical creativity it comes closest, I will suggest, to Michel de Certeau's account of how place and space come into being.

In Austen's Northanger Abbey, the main focus of this essay, scale-making proposes conceptual linkages and declares disjunctures through a continuous, precise labor of abstraction. Austen's characters, for example, frequently pace out the dimensions of rooms they already know or try to calculate the time of someone's arrival. In a typical moment, James Morland says to John Thorpe, "We have been exactly an hour coming from Pulteney-street, very little more than seven miles; and, I suppose, we have at least eight more to go." (10) Austen emphasizes abstract, uniform units of measurement that can be used to calculate distance and coordinate actions in time. Small-scale synchronization is her hallmark. This practice of precise measurement becomes the key to Austen's potentially globalizing or transnational imagination. (11) As I will show through comparison with Scott's Waverley, Austen ultimately aims at large-scale, theoretically unlimited networks of commensurability and accessibility--"approaches," to use her term. Seeing how the global can be derived through a focus on small-scale abstract units will help us better understand Austen's curious relation to Romantic historicism, as well as that movement's ambivalence toward the idea of the global.

I have chosen to concentrate on Northanger Abbey rather than on Mansfield Park or Persuasion, which are also preoccupied with measuring time and space, for reasons both internal and external to the novel. Written in the late 1790s, sold in 1803, reacquired in 1816, revised and published in 1817, Northanger Abbey not only bridges Austen's career but encompasses in its generation the period identified by Georg Lukacs as giving birth to historicist consciousness itself. Pointing to the "quick succession of upheavals" occurring all over Europe, Lukacs asserts that there arose in these decades "the feeling first that there is such a thing as history, that it is an uninterrupted process of changes and finally that it has a direct effect upon the life of every individual." (12) This is also the period of Waverley's similarly long-drawn-out composition, noted by Scott in his General Introduction of 1829. Taking as its subject matter the uneven development of nations and sub-nations, Waverley is exemplary with regard to Scott's future novels and for Romantic historicism more generally. (13) Northanger Abbey encodes this period of historicist awakening differently, as Austen's advertisement to the published novel suggests. Austen simply notes "that thirteen years have passed since it was finished, many more since it was begun, and that during that period, places, manners, books, and opinions have undergone considerable changes" (3). The observation is at once precise and abstract, with an implication that the quantity should speak for itself.

The pervasive irony of this particular novel, I would suggest, stems as much from its way of encoding time as it does from its relation to the Radcliffean Gothic. (14) For example, when Catherine, its protagonist, is abruptly sent home from Northanger Abbey without explanation, her feelings are precisely clocked, even detemained by her changing position in time and space: [T]he road she now travelled was the same which only ten days ago she had so happily passed along in going to and from Woodston; and, for fourteen miles, every bitter feeling was rendered more severe by the review of objects on which she had first looked under impressions so different. Every mile, as it brought her nearer Woodston, added to her sufferings, and when within the distance of five, she passed the turning which led to it ... her grief and agitation were excessive ... (170)

What interests Austen is not the road as a chronotope or as a potential type of story, but rather the vector of movement along the road and the possibility of measuring and calculating that motion. Catherine's feelings are a function of her position on the road to Woodston, and that position is marked and measured in days, minutes, and miles with a quantitative precision that ironizes her "excessive" grief. Even for Austen, Northanger Abbey is oddly precise in measuring distance and time, and it does so in a mode more than usually abstract.

In Northanger Abbey most obviously, but in other Austen novels as well, place is both more and less than geographical. It is an abstract, almost mathematical system of possibilities. Her novels map the coordinates and nonspatial pathways that link together acts, moments, places, and persons considered as strategic sites. Austen can be seen as a novelist of place in Michel de Certeau's sense of the word: "the order ... in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence." (15) Certeau makes a foundational distinction between what he calls place, which imposes a static organization of bounded locations, and the "opaque and blind mobility" that he associates with the realm of everyday practice. (16) This mobility by itself generates what he calls space. As the antithesis of place, space is somewhat counterintuitively said to be produced by "the ensemble of movements deployed within it." Place exists independently of use, while the dimension of space can only be created through users' movements. The distinction is analogous to that made between langue and parole. If Austen maps what Certeau calls a "configuration of positions," Scott sees himself as the novelist of space. (17) "I cannot boast of having sketched any distinct plan [i.e. map] of the work. The whole adventures of Waverley, in his movements up and down the country ... are managed without much skill. It suited best, however, the road I wanted to travel" (354). Certeau's place/ space opposition becomes most useful, however, when we use it to examine more closely the scale-making projects of Austen and Scott. Here, the opposition breaks down, but gives rise to a clearer sense of other distinctions that underlie what we now think of as Romantic historicism. That project, as James Chandler has shown, lies in the creative resolution of a chronological sense of time as ongoing movement with a cultural sense of time as that which unifies a given moment. (18) My goal is to show how Austen refrains from the tendencies of Romantic historicism to aestheticize structures of time. Her minute synchronizations point toward the time of globalizing modernity, the world of "objects in motion," put into motion for the sake of profit and pleasure. (19)

Catherine Morland arrives at Northanger Abbey and is receiving a welcome from General Tilney "when taking out his watch, he stopped short to pronounce it with surprize within twenty minutes of five!" She is "hurried away by Miss Tilney" to dress and show herself in the dining room at five o'clock (118). In Waverley, portraits are consulted in the way that pocket-watches are in Austen. A glance at a portrait, or a coat of arms, and you know where you are and what you ought to be. (20) But it doesn't mean that you will arrive at the same moment as everyone else. (21) In Austen generally, timing is a task of strange importance. "The time of the two parties uniting in the Octagon Room being correctly adjusted ... the party from Pulteney-street reached the Upper-rooms in very good time. The Thorpes and James Morland were there only two minutes before them" (35) Catherine's intended walk with the Tilneys is carefully synchronized with Eleanor Tilney: "At twelve o'clock they were to call for her ... and 'remember--twelve o'clock,' was her parting speech to her new friend" (57). The next morning, Catherine goes "every five minutes to the clock" between eleven o'clock and half-past twelve, only to be undone by various contingencies (58). At the end of the day she learns "that a gentleman and lady had called and inquired for her a few minutes after her setting off" (63-64). So much depends on a few minutes.

In Austen, it is a given that characters can occupy the same point in space at the exactly same moment. Moreover, the time when someone will arrive at that point can be calculated with exactness. General Tilney says to his son: "on Wednesday, I think, Henry, you may expect us.... Two hours and three quarters will carry us to Woodston, I suppose; we shall be in the carriage by ten; so, about a quarter before one on Wednesday, you may look for us" (154-55). Sometimes the calculation is based on incorrect assumptions, as when Catherine decides to explore the room of the deceased Mrs. Tilney: "she wished to get it over before Henry's return, who was expected on the morrow ... at four o'clock, the sun was now two hours above the horizon" (142). When Henry suddenly comes up the stairs "by the head of which she had yet to pass before she could gain the gallery" (143), Catherine's astonishment only underscores the fact that they are in the same place at the same time, which Henry pronounces to be "a quarter past four (shewing his watch)" (144).

Timing can be calculated because motion always seems to proceed at a constant rather than at a variable rate. When John Thorpe first meets Catherine in Bath, he asks, "How long do you think we have been running it from Tetbury, Miss Morland?" Catherine replies that she does not know the distance. "Her brother told her it was twenty-three miles" (29). Thorpe disputes this: "I know it must be five-and-twenty ... by the time we have been doing it. It is now half after one; we drove out of the inn-yard ... as the town-clock smack eleven; and I defy any man in England to make my horse go less than ten miles an hour ... that makes it exactly twenty-five" (30). Further argument ensues concerning speed, distance, and time. Thorpe tells Catherine, "'I shall exercise [my horse] at the average of four hours every day while I am here.' 'Shall you indeed!' said Catherine very seriously, 'that will be forty miles a day'" (31). And on her way home from Northanger much later, Catherine looks, even in her grief-stricken state, for the "well-known spire" of Salisbury Cathedral, "which would announce her within twenty miles of home." Like a signpost, the famous monument simply indicates that she will arrive home "between six and seven o'clock in the evening," "eleven hours" after leaving Northanger (171-72).

Abstraction is what makes possible not just the functional scaling-down of the famous cathedral but the general conversion of distance into time. (22) There is an unexpected resemblance between Austen's space and that which characterizes, according to Bakhtin, the world of the Greek romance: "this size and diversity [of the world] is utterly abstract.... The nature of a given place does not figure as a component in the event; the place figures in solely as a naked, abstract expanse of space. All adventures ... are thus governed by the interchangeability of space." (23) Austen's novel has public spaces and private spaces, with entrances, exits, seats, windows, passageways and roads that connect them; frequently they are named, but whatever local identity they may possess usually has little bearing on the adventure. (24) When Catherine leaves Bath with the Tilneys, what she experiences is only the process of departure itself, and the journey, measured in miles. "The bustle of going was not pleasant.--The clock struck ten while the trunks were carrying down," and they then begin their "journey of thirty miles ... to be now divided into two equal stages" (112-13). Itself devoid of qualities, containing only distances, space still has to be observed and marked. On the way to Northanger Abbey, "she ... met with every mile-stone before she expected it. The tediousness of a two hours' bait ... in which there was nothing to be done but to eat without being hungry, and loiter about without any thing to see, next followed" (113).

Time is also divided into units ranging from weeks--"the present was now comprised in another three weeks" (100), to hours--"a sound sleep, which lasted nine hours" (41), to "half a minute" (37). Time's meaning is found solely in its quantity, and even that is relative. The narrative mocks the idea of intensive, qualitatively unique time. Isabella's "long, long endless two years and a half before [James] can hold the living" is manifestly an affectation (99). Comfort, that supreme Austen value, derives from the partitioning and scaling of time. "The mess-room will drink Isabella Thorpe for a fortnight, and she will laugh with your brother over poor Tilney's passion for a month," Henry tells Catherine, whereupon she "would contend no longer against comfort" (110-11).

In Waverley, however, simultaneity only emphasizes the absence of synchronization in a deeper historical and cultural sense. Contemporaneity is in fact uncanny, as Ian Duncan has argued in the case of Rob Roy. (25) Even beyond the historical theory of uneven development or incomplete modernization, we can note another reason that simultaneity appears superficial or even illusory. In Scott's novels it is not possible to inhabit the same time because events as well as individuals are defined in terms of the layering or intersection of differently scaled temporal vectors. (26) Only the rare context of crisis and shared ideology can bring forth "kindred spirits, who felt the same impulse of mood and time" (209). But even within the same ideological camp, attempts at coordination only highlight the existence of radically varying measures of time. The Jacobite forces, for example, assemble outside Edinburgh early in the morning before they begin their march southward "to change the fate, and alter the dynasty, of the British kingdoms" (215). Scott draws attention to this scene's "scale," which is "of much greater magnitude" than earlier scenes of social gathering (212). Even though these groups happen to be in one place at the same time, everyone is operating in and from a different time. The Jacobites' "motions appeared spontaneous and confused ... [a] complicated medley created by the hasty arrangement of the various clans ... a changing, fluctuating, and confused appearance....At length the mixed and wavering multitude arranged themselves into a narrow and dusky column of great length, stretching through the whole extent of the valley" (212). Even after the column of march is formed, temporal disparities only continue to build up. Many of the cavalry "added to the liveliness ... by galloping their horses as fast forward as the press would permit, to join their proper station in the van....the Circes of the High Street, and the potions of strength with which they had been drenched over night, had probably detained these heroes within the walls of Edinburgh" (213).

Even within tiffs epically-scaled moment of coordination, Scott notes the different temporalities that range from the structure of the day (the Highlanders are waking up, others have overslept as a result of nocturnal debauchery), the rotation of the seasons ("the autumn was now waning"), to the physical growth or stunting of the human body over a lifetime, ironically contrasted with social descent as yet another competing scale by which to measure time (212). In the very back of the column Waverley notices "the peasantry of the country, who ... claimed often, with apparent truth, to be of more ancient descent than the masters ... [the peasants were] half naked, stinted in growth, and miserable in aspect." The appearance of this oppressed population, stunted through a lifetime's lack of nourishment, creates "as much surprise as if an invasion of African negroes, or Esquimaux Indians, had issued forth" (214). Scott thus invokes the Enlightenment stadial view of history as the description's final temporal scale. The condition of lateness can be measured in units ranging from minutes to dynasties to stages of civilization. For Scott, every moment is thus essentially a period, brought to life in the tension between different ways of measuring time. The assembly of the ragtag Jacobite army can be seen as participating in a larger chronology, or as itself a unique moment infused with its own striated identity. (27) Each moment can itself be subdivided into even smaller periods, according to the logic of Romantic historicism.

The attempt to pin something down opens up the multiple scales of time implicated in it; it has the effect of producing space. This becomes the key to Scott's method of description, as in the account of the pass of Bally-Brough, the site of a long-ago battle between Highland clans and "low country carls": [T]owards evening ... they entered one of the tremendous passes which afford communication between the high and low country; the path, which was extremely steep and rugged, winded up a chasm between two tremendous rocks, following the passage which a foaming stream ... appeared to have worn for itself in the course of ages. A few slanting beams of the sun, which was now setting, reached the water in its darksome bed.... The descent from the path to the stream was a mere precipice, with here and there a projecting fragment of granite, or a scathed tree, which had warped its twisted roots into the fissures of the rock.... 'The graves of the slain are still to be seen....--if your eyes are good you may see the green specks among the heather.' (76)

Rather than providing spatial dimensions or coordinates, Scott describes the intersection of differently scaled temporalities. The time of day, the geographical time of erosion and natural adaptation, the pre-Union historical time of Scotland all combine in order to produce a particular kind of space. Note, too, that visibility depends not on objective distance but on subjective disposition. Throughout this novel, Scott tends to give what Certeau calls itineraries; he describes the movements of turning, climbing, and descending instead of abstract geometrical relations: (28) In a spot, about a quarter of a mile from the castle, two brooks, which formed the little river, had their junction. The larger of the two came down the long bare valley ... the other stream ... seemed to issue from a very narrow and dark opening.... It was up the course of this last stream that Waverley ... was conducted.... The rocks assumed a thousand peculiar and varied forms. In one place, a crag of huge size presented its gigantic bulk.... In another spot, the projecting rocks from the opposite sides of the chasm had approached so near each other, that two pine-trees laid across, and covered with turf, formed a rustic bridge.... Advancing a few yards ... the path ascended rapidly from the edge of the brook, and the glen widened into a sylvan amphitheatre.... The rocks now receded, but still shewed their grey and shaggy crests.... At a short turning, the path.... suddenly placed Waverley in front of a romantic water-fall.... the brook found its way ... it wandered murmuring down the glen, forming the stream up which Waverley had just ascended. (104-6)

In this set-piece, the description of the "sylvan amphitheatre" in the Highlands where Waverley encounters Flora Mac-Ivor, Scott produces space by tracking motion. (29) Waverley moves through this landscape; Flora moves across and then stops in the middle of a "rustic bridge ... which crossed, like a single black line, the small portion of blue sky" (105). But the most important vectors are the temporal vectors troped by the path and the numerous brooks and streams in the above passage. The characters are eclipsed by the movement of space unfolding itself over time in multiple directions: a stream emerges, the rocks approach, the path ascends, the rocks recede.

In other words, for Scott movement is time and time, movement. Direction or destination seem to matter less than movement's varied, idiosyncratic speeds, rhythms, paces, and modes. Highlanders "moved with a peculiar springing step; but Edward began to find the exercise, to which he was unaccustomed, more fatiguing" (77). Later, another Highlander "stooped down on all fours ... so as to be scarce distinguishable from the healthy ground on which he moved, and ... crept forward on hands and knees" (183). This is where Scott's scale-making most obviously comes into play--at the intersection of bodies, land, and time, or in the realm of what Certeau calls tactics: "The space of a tactic is the space of the other. Thus it must play on and with a terrain imposed on it and organized by the law of a foreign power." (30) As opposed to strategy, which depends on the existence or creation of well-defined spaces, tactics are used by those who have no place, who possess nothing but time. In Certeau's words, they are procedures that gain validity in relation to the pertinence they lend to time--to the circumstances which the precise instant of an intervention turns into a favorable situation, to the rapidity of the movements that change the organization of a space, to the relations among successive moments in an action, to the possible intersections of durations and heterogeneous rhythms, etc. (31)

In Scott's novel, the Jacobite rebellion is purely tactical. The movement has nothing beyond temporary encampments and "the impulse of the moment" (190). The Pretender, Charles Edward Stuart, is a master of precisely timed interventions, of pauses, anticipations, and interruptions. On his first appearance in the novel, "he then paused for an instant, but before Edward could adjust a suitable reply ... he took out a paper and proceeded ... after another short pause, 'if Mr Waverley, should, like his ancestor, Sir Nigel, determine to embrace a cause'" (193). Waverley's response is all too readily determined by these little hesitations and anticipations: "the time, besides, admitted of no deliberation,--and Waverley, kneeling to Charles Edward, devoted his heart and sword to the vindication of his rights!" (193). The aspect of the Jacobite rebellion that receives most attention is its complex and layered tempo. Scott is deeply interested in how fast or how slowly persons mover--"Officers ... passed and re-passed in haste, or loitered in the hall," reads a typical passage--how and when interruptions in the movement occur, and how long they last (191-92).

The space thus produced through the description of movement is not geographic or even cultural space, I would argue, but space meant to be consumed aesthetically. For Scott, the aesthetic as well as the tactical can be defined as consisting in "procedures that gain validity in relation to the pertinence they lend to time." The aesthetic, in other words, lies in a special kind of pertinence given to the perception of time. The overlap of the tactical and the aesthetic can be seen in Scott's fondness for the trope of the diversion. The Highlander leading Waverley's party to Edinburgh makes expert use of time and limited sight-lines to create a diversion, "crawling forward on all fours with the dexterity of an Indian, availing himself of every bush and inequality to escape observation, and never passing over the more exposed parts of his track until the sentinel's back was turned from him." When the moment is right, he "suddenly issue[s] forth from a different part of the thicket," fires, and runs off in a different direction "after giving them a full view of his person," thus creating the opportunity to move forward unnoticed (184).

Waverley himself, according to the novel's early chapters, owes his identity-formation to diversions in both the military and aesthetic senses of the word. Exercising "for hours that internal sorcery by which past or imaginary events are presented in action ... to the eye of the muser," the young Waverley replays in slow motion, as it were, family legends that are rather notably about tactical diversion (17). Lady Alice Waverley, the subject of one favorite legend, sends her son "to make ... an hour's diversion, that the king might have that space for escape....Edward can plainly distinguish the galloping of horses, the cries and shouts of men, with straggling pistol-shots between, rolling forwards to the hall. The lady starts up--a terrified menial rushes in--But why pursue such a description" (16-17). Breaking the frame, Scott draws attention to the aesthetic dimension of diversion.

In this novel, Scott applies the term "romantic" quite precisely to refer to situations in which the tactical and the aesthetic become indistinguishable. The result of Waverley's early diversions are the "romantic tone and colouring" of his mind (18). Other "romantic" spots and situations also reflect the intersection of varied tempos, durations, rhythms, as well as broken scales of space. Time suddenly acquires an almost tactile character, becomes the object of feeling in its own right. "The country around [the castle of Doune] was at once fertile and romantic. Steep banks of wood were broken by corn fields, which this year presented an abundant harvest, already in a great measure cut down" (185). Waverley's "romantic disposition" (147) is illustrated in his response to a poem written by Flora Mac-Ivor about an untimely, "brief but brilliant," English Civil War hero: Flora's "lines were read--read again--then deposited in Waverley's bosom--then again drawn out, and read line by line, in a low and smothered voice, and with frequent pauses" (148). As Ian Duncan has shown, genetic allusions to romance play a key role in enabling Waverley to maintain an imaginary relation to the real contradictions of history, providing for the latter's sentimental recovery and private delectation. (32) But as a distinctively aesthetic phenomenon within Scott's novel, as a figure for the aesthetic itself, the "romantic" arises from an intimately tactical relation to temporal scale. At one point, after a too-prolonged captivity, Waverley's romantic spirit ... was now wearied with inaction. His passion for the wonderful, although it is the nature of such dispositions to be excited by that degree of danger which merely gives dignity to the feeling of the individual exposed to it, had sunk under the extraordinary and apparently insurmountable evils by which he appeared environed.... It was now, however, once more rekindled. (181)

When time again can be felt to acquire a tactical edge, the romantic aesthetic is revived.

Given the importance of simultaneity in her novel, we can expect Austen's descriptions to rely on the antithesis of the itinerary, the map. If the itinerary narrates movement, the map presents, in Certeau's words, "the knowledge of an order of places," without reference to the actual embodied practices that would be necessary in order to attain this knowledge. (33) And this feeling of knowing, I would argue, is the essence of Austen's aesthetic. What she prizes is a sense of cognitive empowerment--of "comfort"--that arises from the detection of purposiveness in a certain configuration. The temporal edges or boundaries of an action, object, or place are conceded, but not particularly relished as "romantic." Thus, the importance of the map. The map projects an impersonal view onto a flat plane. This description of Barton Cottage from Sense and Sensibility illustrates the procedure: "On each side of the entrance was a sitting room, about sixteen feet square; and beyond them were the offices and the stairs. Four bedrooms and two garrets formed the rest of the house." (34) Geometry trumps experience; note that it would be impossible to enter the two sitting rooms simultaneously. Northanger Abbey seems explicitly to mock itinerary-type descriptions, associated with Radcliffean Gothic, as little more than the encoding of libidinal energy. Distractedly thinking of Blaize Castle, Catherine imagines "the happiness of a progress through a long suite of lofty rooms, exhibiting the remains of magnificent furniture ...--the happiness of being stopped in their way along narrow, winding vaults, by a low grated door" (62-63). The itinerary seems to romanticize temporality itself, conflating movement in space with the movement of desire, deriving greater energy from blockage and interruption. While touring the Tilneys' real abbey, Catherine is happy only when she is able to replace the paradigm of geometric relation with the experience of blind mobility: "she was further soothed ... by finding herself successively in a billiard room, and in the General's private apartment, without comprehending their connexion, or being able to turn aright when she left them; and lastly, by passing through a dark little room, owning Henry's authority, and strewed with his litter of books, guns and great coats" (134). This gratifying segment of the tour ends by moving through an uncharted, personal, private space, the room that "owns" Henry. Austen recognizes metonymy as the rhetorical motor behind such descriptions. That trope comes in for its own special moment of shame when Catherine inwardly responds to the revelation that General Tilney was not fond of Mrs. Tilney's favorite walk. "He did not love her walk:--could he therefore have loved her?" (132). That conflation of walker with walk, of subject with movement that we have seen in Scott's novel, is derided as a logical error.

But Austen also produces space through her narrative. It is conceptual and practical rather than aesthetic space. It consists in logical, syntactic, discursive, and ideological relations rather than spatial or perceptual ones. This subordination of the aesthetic production of space to a conceptual one can be seen in a well-known moment when Austen brings her characters to the top of Beechen Cliff, "that noble hill, whose beautiful verdure and hanging coppice render it so striking an object from almost every opening in Bath" (77). Here, Austen replaces the expected Radcliffean, or itinerary-type description of place with Henry Tilney's "lecture on the picturesque": "by an easy transition from a piece of rocky fragment and the withered oak which he had placed near its summit, to oaks in general, to forests, the inclosure of them, waste lands, crown lands and government, he shortly found himself arrived at politics; and from politics, it was an easy step to silence" (81). Even though the characters are standing at the top of the cliff, the rocky fragment and withered oak appear to be purely notional or abstract; and the "transition" is neither the movement of the eye nor the movement of time but a discursive or logical event. Instead of a human subject moving up a landscape, concepts here "step" from the particular to the general, and even march into various discursive fields or contexts ("oaks in general").

This type of movement, logical or quasi-logical, is a critical dimension of Austen's scale-making. Austen abstracts, decontextualizes, and scales down concepts in order to link them together into fields of possibility. We can think of the field initially as something like a set. There is, for instance, the set of Radcliffean Gothic novels: "here they are, in my pocketbook. Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, and ... Horrid Mysteries," Isabella remarks (25). But the field is both more and less than a set of things. It consists of a well-articulated order of "possibilities and interdictions," in Certeau's words, an abstract system of ranked and related positions. (35) If, for Scott, any moment can be reprised as a period, for Austen, any position can give rise to a field of possibilities. Here, for instance, Catherine reflects joyfully on her own selection from an imagined field of candidates, and on the place occupied by Northanger Abbey within a field of possibilities. "She was to be their chosen visitor ... and ... this roof was to be the roof of an abbey! ... With all the chances against her of house, hall, place, court, and cottage, Northanger turned up an abbey" (102). The set or field is open to constant expansion. "'Northanger is not more than half my home,'" Henry Tilney tells Catherine, "'I have an establishment at my own house in Woodston, which is nearly twenty miles from my father's'" (114).

From Mansfield Park we see another example of harmonious adding-on. "'Mansfield, Sotherton, Thornton Lacey,' [Henry Crawford] continued, 'what a society will be comprised in those houses! And at Michaelmas, perhaps, a fourth may be added....'" (36) The "order ... in accord veith which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence" is neither static nor spatial, though it presents itself as such. It is dynamic, expanding, and conceptual. It also shows ideology at work in its purest form, and it is animated by desire at a supra-individual level.

Back on Beechen Cliff, the continuation of the scene is revealing. After the silence following Henry's lecture, Catherine remarks, "I have heard that something very shocking indeed, will soon come out in London ... more horrible than any thing we have met with yet" (81-82). Eleanor's famous misprision highlights the future-oriented and desire-driven character of the field. It is essential to look for something that may be coming, or may be happening elsewhere, even or especially within the literary field. Even the geometric apprehension of space serves this larger conceptual field of desire. In the Pump-room, Isabella "led the way to a seat. 'This is my favourite place,' said she, as they sat down on a bench between the doors, which commanded a tolerable view of every body entering at either, 'it is so out of the way.'" When Catherine asks, "'who are you looking for?,'" Isabella replies, "'I am not looking for any body. One's eyes must be somewhere, and you know what a foolish trick I have of fixing mine, when my thoughts are an hundred miles off. I am amazingly absent; I believe I am the most absent creature in the world'" (103). Wherever she might be, Isabella would be equally far-sighted, one suspects. But her self-described "absence" mirrors the strange ontology of the field. What is present is supplemented if not entirely displaced by a notional "elsewhere" or "someone else," as Henry Tilney reminds Catherine. The duty of any couple, however temporarily or permanently situated, he asserts, is "to give the other no cause for wishing that he or she had bestowed themselves elsewhere, and ... to keep their own imaginations from ... fancying that they should have been better off with any one else" (54-55). Ethics requires the fiction that choice, once made, abolishes the field as such.

But both before and after a choice has been made, Austen's fields continue to develop through intense internal competition and struggle. (37) Tellingly, this process occurs under the clock, almost literally in this scene. Mrs. Allen and Catherine first meet the Thorpe family in the Pump-room "near the great clock." After they have been sitting down "ten minutes" (18), there approaches a lady who turns out to be "a former school-fellow and intimate" of Mrs. Allen's. Mrs. Thorpe proceeds to boast to Mrs. Allen, whom she has not seen "for the last fifteen years," of the children that she has produced in the interval, "the talents of her sons, and the beauty of her daughters,--... their different situations and views." But the childless Mrs. Allen is even more quickly gratified by "the discovery, which her keen eye soon made, that the lace on Mrs. Thorpe's pelisse was not half so handsome as that on her own" (19). Ten minutes, fifteen years, the cost of lace (for once, not specified, however) are easily woven into the same calculations. In the end, the clock reminds us that it is not time but money that creates a field, generates positions, and keeps things temporarily stable. Elsewhere, Mrs. Allen is both more forthcoming and more precise in calculating comparative economic advantage. Through this extremely minor character, essentially a talking clothes-hanger, Austen arrives at a way of thinking about time, distance, money, and commodities that moves beyond the preoccupations of Romantic historicism.

Georg Simmel's description of the social effects of a money-based economy points to the material basis of Austen's calibrated abstractions: The mathematical character of money imbues the relationship of the elements of life with a precision ... in the same way as the general use of pocket watches has brought about a similar effect in daily life.... the determination of abstract time by clocks provides a system for the most detailed and definite arrangements and measurements that imparts an otherwise unattainable transparency and calculability to the contents of life, at least as regards their practical management. (38)

As Mrs. Allen and Henry Tilney discuss the cost and availability of muslins in one scene, their conversation outlines a way of directly apprehending space and time through the precise calculation and synchronization of money and goods. When Mrs. Allen remarks that her gown "cost but nine shillings a yard," Tilney brags of having bought his sister a gown "the other day [for] five shillings a yard." This leads Mrs. Allen to praise Bath in the following terms:

'Bath is a charming place, sir; there are so many good shops here.--We are sadly off in the country; not but what we have very good shops in Salisbury, but it is so far to go;--eight miles is a long way; Mr. Allen says it is nine, measured nine, but I am sure it cannot be more than eight; and it is such a fag--I come back tired to death. Now here one can step out of doors and get a thing in five minutes.' (17)

In the city, in five minutes one can spend nine shillings a yard. Mrs. Allen suggests an improved, modern mode of measuring time: not merely miles per hour but shillings per yard per minute. Commodities also take on the function of indexing the passage of time. "'My dear, do not you think these silk gloves wear very well? I put them on new the first time of our going to the Lower Rooms, you know, and I have worn them a great deal since. Do you remember that evening?'" (176). There is no need for remembering, since the price of your gloves will tell time just as well. (39)

The conceptual framework of modernity allows Austen to establish her famously small scale. Scaling down to the unit of the hour, the minute, and the shilling allows any of these units to be added together infinitely; and it allows these disparate systems of measurement to be linked on the same level of understanding and action. (40) In this way, Austen's scale-making can be linked to the larger cultural work performed by the discourses of probability that became increasingly pervasive and powerful in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In Matthew Wickman's words, probabilism worked "to render alterity familiar, to make the contingent seem predictable, and to subdue the unforeseeable ... under a governance of expectation." (41)

Austen's framework of calculation also permits qualitative differences to be lightly subordinated to quantity. Austen's last novel, Sanditon, for example, opens with Mr. Parker introducing this "'young and rising Bathingplace, certainly the favourite spot of all that are to be found along the coast of Sussex;--the most favoured by Nature, and promising to be the most chosen by Man'" (298). When his interlocutor objects that "'[e]very five years, one hears of some new place or other starting up by the Sea, and growing the fashion....'" Parker insists that "'those good people who are trying to add to the number, are in my opinion excessively absurd.'" Parker argues for Sanditon's natural superiority: "Nature had ... spoken in the most intelligible Characters--The finest, purest Sea Breeze on the Coast ... fine hard Sand--Deep Water ten yards from the Shore--no Mud--no Weeds--no slimey rocks ... the very Spot which Thousands seemed in need of--... One complete, measured mile nearer [London] than East Bourne" (299). With just a touch of irony, the punchline, the final quantitative criterion of "one measured mile," seems to validate rather than to undermine the natural aesthetic claims of Parker's resort. It places the texture of the sand and the freshness of the breeze on the same footing as an abstract unit of measurement, translated into the projected movements of unknown bodies at an equal rate of speed.

Austen's modern scale-making acquires perhaps its greatest ideological power in the way it overcomes distinctions between subjectivity and objectivity, or between number, space, and desire. The trope of the "approach," for instance, expresses the wish not so much to possess something as to have it within concrete, measurable reach. It overcomes the distinction between possibility and probability. As a metaphor for the concretization of possibility, it transcends its provenance in the discourse of the picturesque, and comes to stand for a way of staking claim to something that hasn't yet been realized. When Catherine receives her invitation to Northanger Abbey, for example, she imagines ecstatically that "its narrow cells and ruined chapel, were to be within her daily reach" (102). The narrative context links the idea of the approach with that of modernity. As Catherine arrives at the abbey, she found herself passing through the great gates of the lodge ... without having discerned even an antique chimney.... there was a something in this mode of approach which she certainly had not expected. To pass between lodges of a modern appearance, to find herself with such ease in the very precincts of an abbey, and driven so rapidly along a smooth, level road of fine gravel, without obstacle, alarm, or solemnity of any kind, struck her as odd. (117)

The approach is the concrete possibility of permanent access to an elsewhere; its opposite is the obstacle. In its modern "mode" it is "smooth, level," easy and imperceptible--a channel of regular communication, of future determination. (42) It is oriented toward the future rather than the past. And in the calibration and calculation of approaches lies the essence of Austen's novelistic strategy: the novel as approach. "The anxiety, which in this state of their attachment must be the portion of Henry and Catherine ... as to its final event, can hardly extend, I fear, to the bosom of my readers, who will see in the tell-tale compression of the pages before them, that we are all hastening together to perfect felicity" (185). There is little need for anxiety when we can map and measure the approach to felicity through the number of pages that separate us from the end. (43)

As a number of recent critical studies have shown, Scott's novels influentially propagated the imagination of the Scottish borders, the Highlands, Scotland, the Celtic periphery, Europe, as scales that are independent but also linked to each other within a historicist or a world-system framework. (44) Austen's detailed abstractions seem resistant to a core-periphery way of thinking. As Franco Moretti points out, Austen's novels end just where many of Scott's novels begin. (45) But what is curious about Austen's scale-making is how it makes the tiny abstract unit of the mile or the minute the basis for an unlimited and highly pragmatic imagining of space. In some ways she gives us a world that is not itself possessed of any size at all--neither small, large, nor "middle-sized," as Moretti calls it. (46) Her novels do not seem to map out spatial locations or geopolitical regions so much as oddly concrete, and for that reason alluring, sets or fields of future possibilities. What engages her is the concept of the expanding field, and the concretization of possibility in the context of strategic action. Her famed precision can be seen not tautologically as a function of her smallness of scale, but historically as the result of her position within the rapidly-globalizing formation of capitalism. Both in its nineteenth- and twentieth-century incarnations, liberalism, "as an economic doctrine promoting the free circulation of goods, currencies, labor, and more across national and regional borders, is a set of scale-making projects." (47) Austen's illimitable reach comes about through such scale-making, and through her precise control over measured, calculated, and uniform units of time that are abstracted from local circumstance--even from narrative context. (48) Perhaps this can help us understand a striking feature of the reception and translation histories of Austen and Scott. Austen's status in the world system of literature rises sharply at the end of the twentieth century, at the moment when globalization becomes something broadly experienced in everyday life. (49) After a long downturn, critical interest in Scott also revives in the last decade of the twentieth century in response to theoretical interest in globalization. (50) But Austen's soaring popularity, linked in large part to the film and television adaptations of her novels, seems to be linked to the ways in which she measures in terms both larger and much smaller than the nation, on a scale derived from the movements of bodies in what appears to be unmarked space. In her novels, space can be concrete, nostalgic, marked with national and class characteristics; but her insistence on the precise coordination of individual movements also allows that space to be seen as abstract, even though of course it is not. But in Austen's novel, a mile is always a mile, a minute is a minute, and both extend indefinitely into the future. (51) Making a large leap in space and time, we can recognize something similar to Austen's scale-making in the pages of a 1994 issue of a mainstream Chinese women's magazine, which argues that "modern time has to be partitioned to minutes and seconds, and that this partitioning must replace the more cyclic and backward-looking time of agrarian society.... it is imperative that [China] adjust its clock, increase its speed, and synchronize with global time." (52) If the global, as Saskia Sassen has argued, takes shape "in a worldwide grid of strategic places"--operating on the same precisely partitioned time--we can glimpse it coming in the pages of Austen's novels. (53)

Wellesley College

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(1.) The quotation from one of Austen's letters is given in a "Postscript" to Henry Austen's biographical notice to Persuasion and Northanger Abbey--a postscript to a notice to a posthumous publication. Austen refers to her work as "a little bit of ivory, two inches wide, on which I work with a brush so fine as to produce little effect after much labour." Austen, "Biographical Notice of the Author," in Jane Austen, Persuasion, ed. James Kinsley (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 7.

(2.) Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 49, 31-32.

(3.) Sir Walter Scott, "Emma: A Novel," Quarterly Review 14 (October 1815): 189, 193.

(4.) Scott, "Emma: A Novel," 190.

(5.) Sir Walter Scott, Waverley, ed. Claire Lamont (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 340. All further references to this edition hereafter cited parenthetically by page number in the text.

(6.) Anna Tsing, "Inside the Economy of Appearances," in Globalization, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 159-60. Tsing offers a curious chapter in the recent history of globalization, a modern Waverleyesque tale that involves Canadian investors, fabled Indonesian gold mines, and a speculative frenzy driven by differently-scaled yet interconnected dreams of self-enrichment. In her case, "wild and empty spaces where discovering resources, not stealing them, is possible ... the story of the frontier," allowed the dreams of globalization-minded Canadian investors and of equally greedy Indonesian politicians and bureaucrats to intersect for one brief moment (175).

(7.) Tsing, "Inside the Economy of Appearances," 161.

(8.) Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900 (London: Verso, 1998), 22-38.

(9.) Appadurai, Modernity at Large (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 114-38 ("Number in the Colonial Imagination").

(10.) Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, Lady Susan, The Watsons, Sanditon, eds. James Kinsley and John Davie (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 63. All further references to this edition hereafter cited parenthetically by page number in the text.

(11.) See Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), as well as Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson, eds., Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Tim Fulford, Debbie Lee, and Peter J. Kitson, eds., Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era: Bodies of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992). On Scott in particular, see James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Ian Duncan, Scott's Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

(12.) Lukacs, Historical Novel, 23.

(13.) As Ian Duncan points out and persuasively refutes in "Primitive Inventions: Rob Roy, Nation, and World System," Eighteenth Century Fiction 15, no. 1 (2002): 81-102; and cf. Chandler, England in 1819, esp. 77-85.

(14.) As Narelle Shaw points out, no ins. survives of the revised Northanger; but given Austen's famously obsessive revising, it seems unlikely that she would release it without extensive revision at some level. See "Free Indirect Speech and Jane Austen's 1816 Revision of Northanger Abbey," SEL 30, no. 4 (1990): 591-601.

(15.) Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 117.

(16.) Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 93; Certeau's emphasis.

(17.) Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 117.

(18.) See Chandler, Euglaud in 1819, 94-154 and 203-64. See also Mary Favret, War at a Distance: Romauticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 162, on how "the uncertain chronology of affect" produced by war-time challenges the "clock time of historicism with its clear divisions and oblivions."

(19.) Arjun Appadurai, "Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination," in Globalization, ed. Appadurai (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 5. For a reading of Austen as counteracting the temporality of modernity, see Deidre Lynch, "Austen Extended/ Austen for Everyday Use," in Imagining Selves: Essays in Honor of Patricia Meyer Spacks, eds. Rivka Swenson and Elise Lauterbach (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 235-65. Austen's novels, Lynch argues, "offered to remedy the mistiming that was the effect of modernity's ... haste, emigration, and warfare," providing a "shared hold on the present" (259). I argue that Austen's novels set the stage for precisely this modern time.

(20.) On the eve of Waverley's departure for the army, his uncle pauses before beginning a farewell speech to "glance at the picture" hanging over the chimney--a portrait of "old Sir Hildebrand ... and his horse." As a result, Waverley receives from his uncle an important reminder of where he is, which is to say, who he is and ought to be as a result of what has been in the past: "'in the field of battle,' Sir Everard states, 'you will remember what name you bear'" (25). On the portraits in Waverley, see Jerome Christensen, Romanticism at the End of History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 158-60.

(21.) This may bring to mind the well-known moment in Pride and Prejudice, when Elizabeth looks at Darcy's portrait at Pemberley. However, it should be noted that in that scene, and in the scene that follows, there's a strong emphasis on position, and on "fixing" or attempting to fix a person in a position. Elizabeth "stood before the canvas and fixed his eyes upon herself"; after encountering him in the grounds, she cannot stop wondering where he is: "Her thoughts were all fixed on that one spot of Pemberley House, whichever it might be, where Mr. Darcy then was" (Austen, Pride and Prejudice, ed. James Kinsley [New York: Oxford University Press, 2004], 191).

(22.) In other novels, the abstraction of space and time is handled in a more nuanced manner, though I would argue that it still stands as the norm. Persuasion stands out as the special case here, in its careful description of places such as Lyme. Nevertheless, that novel retains this abstraction of space and time by representing it as a psychological symptom, as when Anne loses sight, literally, of the particular features of the room she's in. Anne is able to be aware of both the subjective, sentimental determination of particular places, and their objective dimensions, as in the width of her father's apartments in Bath, or the smallness of the rooms in the Harvilles's house in Lyme. As Charles Rzepka has also pointed out, the separation of the global-historical and the local-domestic is retained in the novel's treatment of the present moment as shaped by but not continuous with the events of the recent past (personal comment, 5/5/2011).

(23.) Mikhail Bakhtin, "Forms of Thole and Chronotope in the Novel," in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 100.

(24.) Again, Persuasion suggests itself as a counter-example; but even here, despite greater attention given to names and particular locations, interchangeable, generic features such as stairs and hallways, doors and benches are what prove to be crucial.

(25.) Duncan, "Primitive Inventions," 86.

(26.) The account of Fergus and Flora Mac-Ivor, given several chapters earlier, notes that, descended of a French mother and Scottish father exiled after the failed uprising of 1715, Fergus's character "assumed a mixed and peculiar tone, which could only have been acquired Sixty Years since. Had Fergus Mac-Ivor lived sixty years sooner than he did, he would ... have wanted the polished manner and knowledge of the world which he now possessed; and had he lived sixty years later, his ambition ... would have lacked the fuel which his situation now afforded" (91-92). The Mac-Ivors' identity is derived from the historical juncture at which they are located: exactly here and only here, at the crossing of these two streams of time. It is only this intersection that permits Fergus Mac-Ivor to refer dismissively to the "barbarous ritual of our forefathers" (102) in the interval of a Highland feast over which he presides; or allows Flora to diagnose her own "enthusiasm" with a clinical, Enlightenment detachment even as she avows it passionately (135).

(27.) See Chandler, England in 1819, 68-74.

(28.) Certeau draws on studies of natural language to define the itinerary as one type of spatial descriptive practice: "'You turn right and come into ... you enter, you go across.'" The other is the map. See The Practice of Everyday Life, 119.

(29.) In seeing space as produced through descriptive maneuver, my reading departs somewhat from that of Saree Makdisi, who has argued that Scott's Highlands can be seen as a Wordsworthian spot of time, viewed in the context of Britain's rapid self-modernization in the Romantic era. Makdisi considers these as "self-enclosed and self-referential enclaves of the anti-modern, each defined by its own unique structures of leering and its own distinct temporality" (Romantic Imperialism, 12).

(30.) Certeau, The Practice of Everyday, Life, 37.

(31.) Certeau, The Practice of Everyday, Life, 38.

(32.) See, in particular, Duncan's elegant description of romance as "an aesthetic enclosure movement" in Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 59.

(33.) Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 119.

(34.) Sense and Sensibility, ed. Ros Ballaster (London: Penguin, 2003), 30.

(35.) Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 98.

(36.) Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. Tony Tanner (1966; rpt. London: Penguin, 1985), 377.

(37.) See Pierre Bourdieu's discussion of "the field of power" in The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 215-23. See also Alex Woloch's innovative discussion of the character system in Austen in The One vs. The Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 12-42 and 43-124.

(38.) Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (London: Routledge, 2004), 483.

(39.) Thorpe boasts of his gig, which he bought from a friend "directly," or without hesitation, for fifty guineas, "'I might have sold it for ten guineas more the next day; Jackson ... bid me sixty at once'" (31). The fifty guineas that enable ten miles to be equated to one hour may be equal to sixty guineas after twenty-four hours.

(40.) For a forceful counterargument, see William Galperin's argument about missed opportunities in The Historical Austen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Galperin's study offers a very different reading of possibility to which, however, I am greatly indebted.

(41.) Matthew Wickman, "Of Probability, Romance, and the Spatial Dimensions of Eighteenth-Century Narrative," Eighteenth Century Fiction 15, no. 1 (2002): 62. See also Douglas Patey, Probability and Literary Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); and Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).

(42.) See Jeffrey Schnapp, "Crash (Speed as Engine of Individuation)," Modernism/Modernity 6, no. 1 (1999): 1-49. Though Schnapp does not discuss Austen, her novels participate in the discourse he describes. Indeed, Austen seems to anticipate in this representation, the confidence of railway travel at the end of her century: "'With well-built machines, well-tested materials, and a good rail bed ... speed ... ought to cause no alarm'" (cited in Schnapp, 25).

(43.) Speed and money are expressions of the same thing, as the novel reminds us. When James Morland decides that the party headed to Blaize Castle should turn back because it is "too late," John Thorpe angrily blames "'that cursed broken-winded jade's pace'" of Morland's horse: "'Morland is a fool for not keeping a horse and gig of his own.' 'No, he is not,' said Catherine warmly, 'for I am sure he could not afford it.' 'And why cannot he afford it?' 'Because he has not money enough'" (63).

(44.) See, for example, Ian Duncan, Ann Rowland, and Charles Snodgrass, eds., "Scott, Scotland, and Romantic Nationalism," SiR 40, no. 1 (Spring 2001).

(45.) Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 33.

(46.) Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 22.

(47.) Tsing, "Inside the Economy of Appearances," 161.

(48.) See the essays, for instance, in Janeites: Austen's Disciples and Devotees, ed. Deidre Lynch (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). In that volume, Claudia Johnson describes a "Janeite" way of reading that attends less to plot than to detail and isolated characters in "The Divine Miss Jane: Jane Austen, Janeites, and the Discipline of Novel Studies" (32); William Galperin develops this idea in "Austen's Earliest Readers and the Rise of the Janeites." Galperin argues that Austen's early readers were interested in the "errancy" (94) of Austen's novels, or their minimalization of plot as a source of interest. Galperin also links this characteristic with Michel de Certeau's theorization of everyday life (90, 95).

(49.) See Annika Bautz, The Reception of Jane Austen and Walter Scott: A Comparative Longitudinal Study (New York: Continuum, 2007), and Anthony Mandal and Brian Southam, eds., The Reception of Jane Austen in Europe (New York: Continuum, 2007). In the 1990s in particular, Austen's popularity took a sharp upturn not only in Britain and North America but across Europe.

(50.) See, for instance, Ayse Celikkol, "Free Trade and Disloyal Smugglers in Scott's Guy Mannering and Redgauntlet," ELH 74, no. 4 (2007): 759-82. Celikkol argues that Scott's novels create an abstract space through figures of smugglers, and that this space corresponds to the increasingly global modern mandate of free trade.

(51.) As Mary Favret points out in "Free and Happy: Jane Austen in America," in Janeites, ed. Lynch, some American readers of Austen at the end of the nineteenth century, including William Howells, saw in her style a model of "technical perfection ... that she makes geographically portable" (170).

(52.) Zhang Zhen, "Mediating Time: The 'Rice Bowl of Youth' in Fin de Siecle Urban China," in Globalization, ed. Appadurai, 138.

(53.) Saskia Sassen, "Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global: Elements for a Theorization," in Globalization, 271.