ABSTRACT
Jane Austen had a lifelong interest in attention, particularly the different styles of focus that readers can bring to a book. As early as Catherine, or the Bower (1792), Austen’s heroine is described as “a great reader” of long novels, an attentive character who remembers precise details about plot and scenery. Catherine’s readerly stamina is contrasted to that of her flirtatious friend Camilla Stanley, who has “missed… all” these literary subtleties. Focused on suitors and hats, she cannot be troubled to attend to lengthy novels; she complains of Catherine’s favorite novel: it “is so long” (Juvenilia 249). Exploring Austen’s fascination with such variations in attention, this essay weaves together two themes addressed in Jane Austen and Sciences of the Mind: how Austen’s representations of characters’ thoughts and feelings engage historical theories from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century psychology, and how Austen’s depictions of cognition highlight contemporary findings in neuroscience. Rarely is it possible to connect the historical and the modern. Here, however, we discuss how Austen’s historical depictions of attention and memory shaped an interdisciplinary study that combines literary and neuroscientific methods to explore variations in attention in fiction reading.
