THE LIST EFFECT IN JANE AUSTEN: PREAMBLES

No form of writing appears more matter-of-fact, pedestrian, and prosthetic (as long as memory is concerned) than the list. The logic and the rhetorical character of the list is not that of ordinary prose of flowing speech. Lists have attracted notable commentary and full-length volumes from anthropologists, philosophers, and literary theorists. The most crucial stylistic manifestation of the mobility of things and words in day-to-day petty irony and sarcasm may find its appearance in brief passages, and Austen succinctly alludes to it in the form of lists in her novels.