Reading Bodies in Victorian Fiction : : Associationism, Empathy and Literary Authority / / Peter Katz.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2022 English
• VerfasserIn: Katz, Peter,
• Place / Publishing House: Edinburgh : : Edinburgh University Press, , [2022]; ©2022
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Series: Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture : ECSVC
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (256 p.)

Explores how Victorian novelists used the science of feeling to understand reading as an embodied process that cultivates empathyContextualizes the embodiment of Victorian novelists, critics, and readers through the scientific conversations around themConnects ethical philosophies and scientific discourses about empathy – both historical and contemporaryRethinks Victorian responses to novels in both the academy and popular pressBuilds on twenty-first century conversations about affect, language and empathyReading Bodies in Victorian Fiction challenges literary studies to attend to surfaces rather than interpretation through a history of how we came to think about emotion, empathy and reading fiction as intertwined ideas. Against professional readers, writers of popular fiction argued that emotional reading and sensational novels cultivated an ethics of care. They turned to Associationism – an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century science that understood mental phenomena through physiology – to understand language as a physiological process that draws bodies together. Emotional reading cultivated empathy in popular readers, and imbued popular fiction with cultural value.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: Associationism, Affect and Literary Authority -- 1 Feeling Bodies: Associationism and the Anti-Metaphorics of Materiality -- 2 Symbolic Bodies: The Storyteller, Memory and Suffering in Boz’s ‘The Hospital Patient’ -- 3 Metaphoric Bodies: The Professional Author, Sensation and Serialisation in Great Expectations -- 4 Plastic Bodies: The Scientist, Vital Mechanics and Ethical Habits of Character in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone -- 5 Represented Bodies: The Lawyer, Conclusions and Circumstantial Evidence in Lady Audley’s Secret -- 6 Caring Bodies: The Reformer, Sartorial Exchange and the Work of the Novel in Walter Besant’s Children of Gibeon -- Coda: In Defence of Victorian Optimism -- Bibliography -- Index