Full Description
Reading 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.
Contents
Introduction: Associationism, Affect, and Literary Authority
1. Feeling Bodies: Associationism and the Anti-Metaphorics of Materiality
2. Symbolic Bodies: Memory, The Storyteller, 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
