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Anne Toner provides an original account of the history of ellipsis marks - dots, dashes and asterisks - in English literary writing. Highlighting ever-renewing interest in these forms of non-completion in literature, Toner demonstrates how writers have striven to get closer to the hesitancies and interruptions of spoken language, the indeterminacies of thought, and the successive or fragmented nature of experience by means of these textual symbols. While such punctuation marks may seem routine today, this book describes their emergence in early modern drama and examines the relationship between authors, printers and grammarians in advancing or obstructing the standardisation of the marks. Their development is explored through close study of the works of major English writers, including Jonson, Shakespeare, Richardson, Sterne, Meredith and Woolf, along with visual illustrations of their usage. In particular, Toner traces the evolution of ellipsis marks in the novel, a form highly receptive to elliptical punctuation.

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This article argues that in Jane Austen's work there is an affiliation between the experience of landscape and the forms that fictional works can take. This is evident in 'Catharine, or the Bower' where an analogy is set up between the reading of a novel and travel through a picturesque landscape, a connection that is returned to in Pride and Prejudice. This affiliation can be contextualized first by reference to Austen's comments in her letters about narrative form, and then by reference to contemporary criticism of the novel, in particular that of Anna Barbauld. Barbauld overtly uses landscape for narratological purposes in her introductory essay to Samuel Richardson's Correspondence, alluding to Uvedale Price's Essay on the Picturesque to extol Richardson's formal achievements in Clarissa. Austen's views on narrative organization and on landscape design strongly resonate with Barbauld's, and both writers evoke the picturesque to provide a formalist critique of the novel. Reading and TravellingIn her early, unfinished novel 'Catharine, or the Bower', dated 1792 in the manuscript 'Volume the Third', Jane Austen sets up an analogy between the inattentive reader and the inattentive traveller through the character of Camilla Stanley. When the heroine Kitty asks Camilla which of Charlotte Smith's novels she prefers, Camilla responds: 'Oh! dear, I think there is no comparison between them -Emmeline is so much better than any of the others -'