Bodies and books : reading and the fantasy of communion in nineteenth-century America / Gillian Silverman.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Silverman, Gillian D., 1967-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--19th century--History and criticism.

American literature.

Intimacy (Psychology) in literature.

Interpersonal relations in literature.

Books and reading--Psychological aspects.

Books and reading.

Books and reading--United States--History--19th century.

Authors and readers--United States--History--19th century.

Authors and readers.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (241 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, c2012.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In nineteenth-century America, Gillian Silverman contends, reading-and particularly book reading-precipitated intense fantasies of communion. In handling a book, the reader imagined touching and being touched by the people affiliated with that book's narrative world-an author, a character, a fellow reader. This experience often led to a sense of consubstantiality, a fantasy that the reader, the material book, and the imagined other were momentarily merged. Such a fantasy challenges psychological conceptions of discrete subjectivity along with the very notion of corporeal integrity-the idea that we are detached, skin-bound, and autonomously functioning entities. It forces us to envision readers not as liberal subjects, pursuing reading as a means toward privacy, interiority, and individuation, but rather as communal beings inseparable from objects in our psychic and phenomenal world. While theorists have long emphasized the way reading can promote a sense of abstract belonging, Bodies and Books emphasizes the intense somatic bonds that nineteenth-century subjects experienced while reading. Silverman bridges the gap between the cognitive and material effects of reading, arguing that the two worked in tandem, enabling readers to feel deep communion with objects (both human and nonhuman) in the external world. Drawing on the letters and diaries of nineteenth-century readers along with literary works by Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Susan Warner, and others, Silverman explores the book as a technology of intimacy and ponders what nineteenth-century readers might be able to teach us two centuries later.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Preface. Reading and the Search for Oneness

Introduction. The Fantasy of Communion

Chapter 1. Railroad Reading, Wayward Reading

Chapter 2. Books and the Dead

Chapter 3. Textual Sentimentalism: Incest and the Author-Reader Bond in Melville's Pierre

Chapter 4. Outside the Circle: Embodied Communion in Frederick Douglass's 1845 Narrative

Chapter 5. "The Polishing Attrition": Reading, Writing, and Renunciation in the Work of Susan Warner

Epilogue. No End in Sight

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781283898805

1283898802

9780812206180

0812206185

OCLC:

847551175